Podcast: Helen Oyeyemi | Granta Magazine

Podcast Ep. 68: Helen Oyeyemi

Ted Hodgkinson & Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi speaks to Ted Hodgkinson about the joys of writing from a male perspective, magic in her work, and how as a girl she wrote alternate endings to the classics.


Helen Oyeyemi is the author of The Icarus Girl and The Opposite House. Her third novel, White is for Witching, was awarded a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award, and her fourth, Mr Fox, won the 2012 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Award. Here Oyeyemi speaks to Ted Hodgkinson about the joys of writing from a male perspective, the role of magic in her work, some of her influences from Alfred Hitchcock to Jeanette Winterson and how as a young girl she would write alternate endings in the margins of the classics.

In Conversation
The Online Edition
20th May 2013
In Conversation
The Online Edition
20th May 2013

Ted Hodgkinson

Ted Hodgkinson is the previous online editor at Granta. He was a judge for the 2012 Costa Book Awards’ poetry prize, announced earlier this year. He managed the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Tuscany, the affiliated Gregor Von Rezzori Literary Prize and still serves as an advisor. His stories have appeared in Notes from the Underground and The Mays and his criticism in the Times Literary Supplement. He has an MA in English from Oxford and an MFA from Columbia.

More about the author →

Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi is the author of five novels, most recently Mr Fox and Boy, Snow, Bird. In 2013 she was included in Granta's Best of Young British Novelists list.

More about the author →

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