‘White is for Witching’, by Helen Oyeyemi

‘White Is for Witching’ (2009) centers around a girl named Miranda Silver, who as a child, develops a rare eating disorder that causes her to have the urge to consume non-edible objects. Her condition further comes into play when the Silver House where she lives with her brother and father after her mother’s untimely death becomes more and more agitated. The house is haunted by generations of spirits, who Miranda feels an inescapable attraction and attunation towards.

Combining elements of ghost, vampire, and haunted house stories, ‘White Is for Witching’ is the third novel of Oyeyemi and it has won the 2010 Somerset Maugham Award.

Helen Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and moved to London when she was 4 years old. She completed her first novel, ‘The Icarus Girl’, just before her nineteenth birthday and it was published to great acclaim while she was an undergraduate at Cambridge. While in College, she wrote two plays that were performed by fellow students and subsequently published.

Since leaving Cambridge, Oyeyemi has lived in Paris, Toronto, London, Berlin, Budapest, and Prague, among other global cities. She is the author to date of seven novels, two plays and one short story collection.

Her novel ‘White Is for Witching’ was a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award. In 2013 Oyeyemi was included in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. Her novel ‘Boy, Snow, Bird’ was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2014 and the short story collection, ‘What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours’, won the PEN Open Book Award: for an exceptional book-length work of literature by an author of colour published in 2016.

Book discussion: ‘White is for Witching’ by Helen Oyeyemi

When: Sunday, September 12th, 2021 at 18:00 (6pm, Madrid local time)

Where: Zoom, online. ID: 727-737-7475

We’ll use the software Zoom to meet. Please use the following ID to access: 727-737-7475 or click on https://us04web.zoom.us/j/7277377475
Password, if any, will be “cb”.

Language: English (we’ll debate in English)

Organizer: Andrea M

Contact: +34 668853320

Mandatory: Read the book