What are people's thoughts on this amazing story?

An 18-year-old author has signed a £400,000 deal after publishers accepted her first novel while she was still at school.

Helen Oyeyemi, a first-year student at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, signed the contract on the day she was taking an A-level.

The book deal is one of the biggest for a young writer and puts her in the top bracket of new authors, alongside Zadie Smith and Monica Ali. Oyeyemi even shares the same accountant as Smith and JK Rowling.

The author signed the two-book deal with Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury for her novel The Icarus Girl, which she began writing last year in the sixth form of Notre Dame School, a Southwark comprehensive.

The book is about an eightyearold child genius called Jessamy who, during a visit to relatives in Nigeria, meets Tilly Tilly, a new friend only she is able to see.

But the friendship becomes sinister, with Tilly Tilly apparently revealed as a ghost who wants to claim the girl's body.

Oyeyemi's father is a teacher and her mother is a trainee driver on the London Underground. She said she was surprised at the speed of the deal. "I had to sign the contract between my exams. It was on the day of my theology A-level."

She said she began writing at the age of seven, adding: "I used to rip off stories I had read and liked. I rewrote Little Women so that Laurie married Jo, because I thought that was a better ending."

Her agent Robin Wade showed the book to Alexandra Pringle, editor-in-chief at Bloomsbury and editor for The Secret History author Donna Tartt. Ms Pringle said: "The prose sings immediately right from the page."

Despite her early success, Oyeyemi is not confident she will become a full-time writer. She said: "I don't think that many people can do that these days. I would quite like to be a literary agent."

An amazing story. It just makes me jealous, bitter and hate talented people even more joking

What can you say? Good on her!

Great story, can't wait to read the book.

(And glad she's thinking of being a literary agent - see, we're not all bad, and many of us were writers once too; though obviously not with her kind of talent...)

Oh grate! (as in teeth grinding together) I'm so happy for her...

No, really, I am. I am. Honest. It's wonderful for her... but eighteen? Ahhhh... Sob...

Dee

I can only wish her great good luck and hope that she stays at univeristy and finishes her degree and somebody has enough influence over her to persudae her to invest her money wisely after of course having a decent party and letting her hair down a bit.

I have the same view for anybody who through their own ( legal) devices and talents has good fortune

david

I think it's wonderful! And if she's been writing since seven (I loved her comment about rewriting the ending to Little Women)then I'm sure she's very talented and deserves the recognition, deal, money etc.

Not sure why there had to be a mention in the article of sharing the same accountant as Rowling and Smith - is this accountant famous or something??? Should I be impressed somewhat??? I wonder if my accountant will want a mention when I hit the big time ...hmmmm

Similar thing with Eragon that Christopher Paolini started writing when he was 15. It's now featured very heavily in book shops, amazon, charts etc etc etc..... Oh dear. I should have started all this so much earlier! Only thing is though, that my book wasn't ready to "come out" then!
Sue

Has anyone read this book yet?
I read it a couple weeks ago and I have to say I was rather... shall we say, underwhelmed. Can't really put into words why exactly - I just felt it sagged in the middle, and of course there's my own personal taste - I don't much like anything occult, supernatural, etc. I mean, it wasn't BAd but I just didn't see what was so spectacular about it, or unusual .. which I could see for instance in White Teeth or The God of Small Things. (Brick Lane kind of underwhelmed me as well.) I also doubt that it is bestseller material, begging the question of why the advnace was so high. Perhaps I'm wrong in that, though; who knows what catches on and what not. But didn't White Teeth, GOST, Brick Lane etc all hit the bestseller lists soon after all the hype came out? (As you see, I'm singling out specifically "ethnic" fiction.)
I had a hard time finding this in the local bookshops.
In the other hand, of COURSE I'm just jealous!!!

aruna

i read the first thirty pages or so in a bookstore before deciding whether to buy it and… well, i didnt buy it. the writing, understandably (she was a teenager after all), was very clunky. Im a firm believer that you cant really write unless you’ve read, and read widely at that - not to understand plot or character or any of that other rubbish, but to begin to understand language and expression. The only truly brilliant book ive read by a teenager was a book called Twelve by an american 17yr old written a coupe of years ago - that’s definitely the exception that proves the rule.

I’m sure compared to much of the dross that’s published oyeyemi’s book is perfectly serviceable and deserves to be published, but the real reason oyeyemi received all the attention and the huge advance (a reason people on this thread seemed afraid to mention - perhaps it takes an ‘ethnic’ to do so) was because she was so marketable - young, non-white, female and Oxbridge (just like zadie and monica) - arundhati roy was the great and glorious exception, and the only one who truly penned a novel deserving every inch of the attention it received.

Im not jealous in the slightest, just made very sad that whether or not something gets published depends on metropolitan fancy and the barely creditable leanings of a bunch of marketeers. But the truly sad thing is that the victim of all this hype is oyeyemi herself. She becomes a kind of hostage to fortune, having to try and explain why her book isn’t the masterpiece is was billed to be. After all, she had no control over all the hype that was generated, she just accepted the cheque - and who could blame her for doing that?

When hearing about a teenager writing a novel im usually reminded of Samuel Johnson’s quip about (unjustly, of course) women preachers: ‘it is not done well, but one is surprised to find it done at all.’ And I resent her comment that about wanting to be a literary agent, implying that writing wasn’t really all that important to her, that she could easily live without it. You know, that’s probably why her book (or at least the thirty or so pages I read) wasn’t all that good. I maintain that unless literature is vital to you, that unless something inside you doesn’t feel as though it’s withering when you don’t have a book easily to hand, buried in your bag or squashed into your back pocket, then you have no business writing. And should just go and jolly well take up gardening instead.

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the quip was (unfairly, i repeat) comparing women preachers to seeing a dog walking on its hind legs: 'it is not done well, but one is surprised to find it done at all.'

With the jealousy remark I was of course being facetious; I wanted to say "I'm not jealous" but that seemed too obvious!
I agree with you with the whole ethnic business, at least as far as Oyemi is concerned; that, and her age. The age thing actually bothers me the most; when I think of myself aged 18 - 25 I just can't imagine having ANYTHING worth saying at that age, and if Ihad written a book - well, it might have been written quite well, following alll the ruoes etc, but what would I have had to offer in the way of understanding people and situations, their long term effect,and soon? I'm sure that there are masterpieces writtenby young authors (please remind me of some!) but in Oyeyemi's case I think het main experience is the alienation of being half Africna and half English and not belonging anywhere. But at her age she is stil far too close to it to really understand the process of what it means tobe between two cultures.

I say this becuase I've had similar experiences and it took me decades to really live through that and understand what it's all about.

The ethnic thing doesn't always work. I remember when I first got published the sales and marketing team were all over me trying to think how to exploit that aspect. There were three problems, though - I wasn't young, and I wasn't Indian. My three first books were set mostly in India and they wanted me to be a sort of Indian-woman-writer soryt of thing; exotic love story etc. But not being Indian myself made it difficult. Worse yet, I was from a very unsexy part of the world - Jamaica or any other hip Caribbean Island would have worked, but GUYANA???

I have to add Small Island to the list of literary ethnic novels making the headlines. I've read that too and enjoyed it very much, though I wasn't sure if it was THAT spectacular.

That said, I do think the interest in ethnic novels is valid. We have wonderful stories to tell, and I remember as a child wondering why, though I loved books so much, all of them were about people and places outside of my experience, and longing for something different. "Ethnic" writers can bridge the gaps between cultures, and have an important role to play, but I'm not sure if the right ones are being singled out. All the "TillyTilly" business in The Icaruis Girl began to get on my nerves after a while. All these conversations with an imagined entity... I really don't think it would have bene published if it'd been an English ghost.

Same with Brick Lane. If the same story had been written by an Englishwoman it would have gone nowhere. It had very little substance.

I agree with you about Brick Lane. I thought it was well-written on a line by line basis (I particularly liked the beginning and the character of Chanu) but I found that it added up to something less than the sum of its parts. For me there are two aspects to a novel - there's the wordsmithing and there's the intangible essence of the story and for me Brick Lane lacked the latter.

As for great novels written by young authors what about To Kill a Mockingbird? A wonderful, understated, complex novel. Harper Lee was 24. Of course she hasn't written anything since.

You're right; ... Mockingbird in indeed a great novel. But I wonder, if she had written it later rathetr than earlier in life, whetehr she'd have continued to write?

Silly speculation, of course. But I often wonder if success, when it comes too early, can inhibit the creative process, and the striving for perfection necessary to grow creatively. I find I need a bit of hardship in order to be creative. I notice this now, in writing my fouth novel. With the second two, I notice I was getting slipshod. The fact that I had contracts for them before they were even writen, and that I knew they'd be accepted, meant that I didn't take as much care with them as I would have with a first novel. Also, my editor accepted them without bothering too much about getting them just right.
And now, with a fourth one that has to hit home, I am revising and revising, and finding new depths to it every day.

Intriguing thread. Do you need to be "experienced" (or "grown-up") to produce fiction of value? When I was up at the 'varsity, I took a course in 'writing about childhood' with a teacher called Peter Hollingdale (I think that was his name, it was a long time ago), who had a comprehensive knowledge of books written by young people, teens and pre-teens (and not necessarily books about childhood). He challenged the notion that you have to pay your dues in some sort of time-serving way. I remember him saying that Jack Higgins's daughter (whose name I can't think of) had written a novel set at the time the Battle of Britain when she was a teenager - and it was an impresssive mature work. Haven't read it myself. Was it called "The Distant Summer"?

I took a look at Miss Oyeyemi's book, and I might buy it one of these days - but more likely I'll borrow it from the library. But it's worth reading, I think, from the bit I scanned.

Now I wasn't aware until I read this post, that Helen O was a pupil at Notre Dame school, Southwark. This was a convent back in the 50s (I think with a school attached, but it aint a convent now) and my mother used to be a cleaner there, so I spent some time "within these walls", because she could take me to work. Quite a formative childhood experience for me, expecially in relation to my sense of the Gothic. And I've used it (disguised, of course) in fiction since.

I realise this last detail is more likely to be of interest to me than youse all.

£400,000, eh? Is this true, or just part of the marketing hype?

Joe

Intriguing thread. Do you need to be "experienced" (or "grown-up") to produce fiction of value?

Well... no. A young person can surely produce an excellent story purely out of imaination, and right it beautifully to boot. But I think if in your writing you are exploring certain issues or subjects - relationships, multiculturalism, spirituality and so on - one does need to have gone through the process and come out the other side half way sane and understanding of what is going on - otherwise your work will not be satisfying on a more mature level. If you are young and in the middle of a bad marriage, for instance, you would not have the necessary distance.
In Oyeyemi's case I understand there was a bit of autobiograohy involved - I think I read this somewhere. A suicide attempt or something like that. Perhaps that's why there was a certain clammy feel to the wholething? Don't know - and I am certainly not trying to say that young writers can't wriote or shouldn't be published! Justthat inthis cse, with that subject, I felt that her age was a marketing issue, and that shouldn't be. The you get people saying "For her age it's a good novel". I would hate that - wouldn't you? It's a bad as "For a woman it's a good novel" or "For a black person it's a good novel." Yet almost all the reviews I read of this book say "For her age it's astounding" or something like that.


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OOPS! I do apologize for the typos in the above post - most embarassing. (These days I seem to be confusing write and right a lot... wonder why???)

A while ago I was at a meeting of the Scattered Authors Society, which is an informal group of children's authors. One of the group had just been announcing the results of her survey into children's authors' earnings. It was very sobering. Bearing in mind that many of the Scattered Authors are people who've been writing for decades, getting good reviews, are well respected - good writers in other words, who've worked hard at their craft and care about it. Let's just say that the majority of children's writers who work full-time at writing in the UK don't even make the national minimum wage, and many earn quite a lot less.

At the same meeting, someone mentioned this deal with a teenager we're discussing here. There was a kind of collective groan and one writer, with the same publisher, said, "Well, that's my marketing allocation buggered for the next few years!" In other words, £400,000 has to be earned back, and to earn it back the publisher is going to have to put a lot of money into promoting it. And if it does that, the simple equation is that its other authors won't get so much, if any, promotion. This is the 'mid-list author' syndrome, where increasingly the big-sellers and potential big-sellers (which includes the marketable, basically, e.g. the young, good-looking and ethnically desirable, as opposed to people who can write) get all the promotion and the mid-listers, e.g. the people who don't look so good, or are too old, or too white or whatever, but who can actually write, are getting squeezed out of the market.

The vast majority of Scattered Authors are women, and that may well not be a coincidence, since, however society may be changing, there is still a balance towards some women having husbands/partners with a good income to allow them to do something worthwhile but not get well paid. Of course, that's changing too, so who knows what the future of children's fiction will be? Well, I think we know.

Terry