Professor Elleke Boehmer

Elleke Boehmer FRSL FRHistS FEA is Professor of World Literature in the English Faculty, University of Oxford, and Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College. She is a founding figure in the field of postcolonial and world literature studies in English, with a focus on West African and southern African literature. Recent work includes Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-century readings (2018) and Indian Arrivals 1880-1915: Networks of British Empire (2015), which won the biennial European Society for the Study of English prize 2015-16. Her biography of Nelson Mandela 2008 has been widely translated, as has Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005). Other work includes Empire, the National and the Postcolonial (2002), and the influential Stories of Women (2005). Elleke’s Boehmer’s fiction includes To the Volcano (2019) and The Shouting in the Dark (2015), co-winner of the EASA Olive Schreiner Prize for Prose, 2018. To the Volcano was commended for the Australian Review of Books Elizabeth Jolley Prize, 2019, and longlisted for the Edgehill Prize. In 2019 Elleke Boehmer was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, UK. She is an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford.

African Languages, Literatures and Cultures Network

African Languages, Literatures and Cultures Network has been awarded for two years (2022 - 2024).