Helen Oyeyemi is an award-winning author of eight books. Born in Nigeria, her family moved to London when she was four years old and she published her first novel, The Icarus Girl (2005), while still at school and her second (along with two plays) while at Cambridge University. She won the Somerset Maugham award for White Is for Witching (2009) and the PEN Open Book award for her short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (2016). In 2013, she was named a Granta best young novelist. Now 34, she lives in Prague. Her new novel, Gingerbread, is published this month.
Gingerbread is a novel about an inherited recipe for gingerbread. Are you a fan of the stuff?
I made a lot of gingerbread while I was writing it and researched how people eat it. My favourite recipe is a really healthy one that uses almond flour and dates. I also use Emily Dickinson’s recipe, which has a thick, rich flavour because of the molasses.
Are you a cook, generally, or do you prefer eating out?
Eating out on some sort of food quest can be a good way to get a sense of a neighbourhood, I think – or I’m trying to justify an afternoon I spent ambling around New York’s Lower East Side trying scallion pancakes at a number of different restaurants.
But I also like the kind of eating you can do with your eyes. That happened unexpectedly for me last spring when I was confronted with two centuries’-old pieces of sculpture at the National Palace Museum in Taipei: the Jadeite Cabbage and the Meat-Shaped Stone. I’d never dreamt that cabbage and meat could be captured so delicately and exuberantly for the ages.
Your characters in Gingerbread visit a faraway land that, in your novel, Wikipedia describes as nonexistent. Do you use Wikipedia or are you suspicious of it?
Wikipedia is my first “go to” place, but you also catch yourself thinking, “What if…”. As a fiction writer, you don’t have to have a serious relationship with fact. You can undermine the facts or play games with them.
Do you spend too much time surfing the internet?
I scroll through Tumblr a lot. And I window-shop. On Etsy, I cultivate a wishlist packed with vintage and handcrafted items I admire and can’t own. Seventy-five percent of the time merely looking (and looking and looking) is enough, but my most recent wishlist addition is a crown made of gold lace – it’s described in the listing as “adult size” and I’m simultaneously sheepish and delighted about that. I might make an actual move on this one.
You live in Prague now. What led you to leave Britain and do you no longer consider London to be your home?
The first time I came to Prague was in 2010, when I stayed for six months. I missed it so much that I came back in 2013 and it’s where I’ve been for the past six years. The surrealists loved it and it’s a very layered city; it could be a film set; it could be a fairytale; it could be a gritty, brutalist corner. It’s a combination of hard and soft. But I go back to London twice a year and it’s home to me, but I was just looking for something else and lived in other places.
Where else have you lived?
In Berlin, Paris, Budapest. Now I know what a privilege it was to have the passport [that allowed me to do that]. Maybe I’m one of the last of a generation to be able to live in Europe. I had such a lovely time dating different cities before moving to the Czech Republic.
What do you miss most about London and love most about Prague?
Well, the best locations in the universe are in London. Purely Natural in Stratford is where I’ve been going for 13 years, but I also miss all the cultural gems – the RA, the Wellcome Collection, the Tate, the V&A, though Prague’s Národní Divadlo is really the opera house for me, with its gilded rooftop and verdigrised statues. Its project is supported all across Czech society… people sent their gold teeth in from Pardubice to Prague as contributions to the first fundraising effort for the Divadlo. Being aware of things like that makes you even more fond of a space.
How good or bad is your Czech? Is it a tough language to learn?
I think the Czech language might be marginally less tough for a systematic thinker who doesn’t struggle with gendered words and the grammar rules that go with that (so basically lots of people who think and dream in languages other than English). But my vocabulary isn’t so bad and I’m actively growing that through reading and watching some of my favourite Czech New Wave films with the subtitles off. I don’t have any fantasies about fluency, but I’ll keep going so one day I can say a thing or two that might actually make sense to a Czech speaker.
You wrote and published your first novel when you were a still a teenager. Is there too much pressure on writers to get their best work out before 40? And do you feel pressure now?
I don’t think age should be a thing, especially with writing, of all things. When my first book came out, there were a few snippy reviews saying that this author should “live a bit more”… I haven’t felt any pressure. I have a very interior focus and have just gone from book to book without much awareness of exterior perceptions.
• Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi is published by Picador (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
