Helen Oyeyemi (1984) 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. ‘Boy, Snow, Bird’ is an excerpt from a new novel of the same title, published in 2014 by Picador in the UK and Riverhead in the US.