Prolific writer Oyeyemi shortlisted for BBC short story award

A prolific British writer, Helen Oyeyemi, has been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award.

Ms. Oyeyemi, born on December 10, 1984, is a novelist and writer of short stories.

One of her stories, “If a Book Is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That, Don’t You Think? ” which has been selected has been described by the judges as “brilliant.”

Meanwhile, her story will be competing against four other works: Benjamin Markovits’ “The Collector,” Cynan Jones’s “The Edge of the Shoal,” Will Eaves’s “Murmur,” and ”The Waken,” by Jenni Fagan.

The judges to select the eventual winner include Eimear McBride, Baileys Prize winner for A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, and Joanna Trollope, a release on Brittle Paper indicates.

The panel has described their choices as “a veritable festival of ideas about identity, the innate and the capacity of both for transformation…or not.”

”These are stories about what is hidden, what is revealed, what can be lost and what will remain. While they inhabit very different imaginative, linguistic, political and artistic landscapes, these are the ideas that bind them together and have made each one such a pleasurable discovery,” the panel said.

”All five of our shortlisted writers have embraced the freedom that short fiction offers and all their stories sing out, enduring, bold, humane and moving. However different in style and shape, they prove just how exciting and current the short story is in the UK just now.”

Founded in 2005 by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, NESTA, with support from the BBC Radio and Prospect magazine, the BBC National Short Story Award rewards a superlative short story with 15,000 pounds.

The 2017 award reportedly received 600 entries.

The winner will be announced on 3 October.

MS. Oyeyemi’s latest book, the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, was released in 2016.

Ms. Oyeyemi wrote her first novel, The Icarus Girl, while still at school studying for her A-levels at Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School. 

Also, according to a statement on her website, while studying social and political sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, two of her plays, Juniper’s Whitening and Victimese, wereperformed by fellow students to critical acclaim and subsequently published by Methuen.