Elleke Boehmer

Elleke Boehmer studied at St John's College. The recorded working language is Dutch and English. Employment is recorded with University of Oxford. Distinctions recorded are Rhodes Scholarship, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

• Honorific Suffix — FRSL • Name — Elleke Boehmer • Born — 1961 • Birthplace — Durban, South Africa • Occupation — Novelist, literary critic and academic • Workplaces — University of Oxford • Discipline — Postcolonial Studies

Elleke Boehmer was born to Dutch parents in Durban, South Africa. She studied towards a degree in English and Modern languages in the Eastern Cape, followed by an incomplete year of studying medicine. In this period, she became profoundly influenced by the Black Consciousness thought of the activist leader Steve Biko. After a year and a half of teaching English in Mamelodi township, outside Tshwane (formerly Pretoria) in what is now Gauteng, she won a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford. She completed an MPhil degree in English Literature 1900 to the present, followed by a doctoral thesis on gendered constructions of the nation in post-independence West and East African literature, both at St. John's College. In 1990, she published her first novel, the bildungsroman Screens Against the Sky. She taught at St John's College and then at the Universities of Exeter, Leeds, and Nottingham Trent before her appointment as Hildred Carlile Professor of Literature in English at Royal Holloway, University of London. Since 2007, she has held the Professorship of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford. In 2019, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in the same year a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In April 2022 she became an Honorary Fellow of St John's College, Oxford and in November 2022, she was nominated to de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde (Dutch Society of Letters). She was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2025. Boehmer is married, and has two sons.

Boehmer has identified with the term "writer-critic", a phrase originally intended by J. M. Coetzee to marry with equal emphasis his two reciprocal and commutual vocations. Fiction and criticism have occupied her in tandem since 1990, when she entered her first tenured academic post at the University of Leeds two months after publishing her debut novel. Screens Against the Sky is a bildungsroman that registers the scrutiny of nation, and of self, performed by the generation of writers born in the aftermath of the Sharpeville Massacre (1960) and raised in the time of the Soweto Riots (1976), with Black Consciousness thought ascendant. The epigraphs to the novel are, significantly, from Doris Lessing and Steve Biko. It is the story of a young woman who constructs her social identity through story, diary, and recalcitrance. Like the protagonist of Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter (1979), she also aims to uphold her political commitments while seeking personal fulfilment as a medical volunteer. Among its many reviews, Screens Against the Sky has been described as "An astonishing debut […] swift, deft […] expertly told" (The Sunday Times), "A brilliant handling of an obsessional mother-daughter relationship" (The Financial Times), and "A beautifully authentic insight into a society turned in on itself in the face of black deprivation" (Wendy Woods). The novel was shortlisted for the David Higham Prize in 1991. The politics of gender and race also concern Boehmer's second novel, An Immaculate Figure (1993). The model heroine Rosandra White, the immaculate white figure of the title, is viewed and used as a blank slate upon which a series of male admirers, an 'uncle', an international arms trader, and a revolutionary, seek to inscribe their interests and desires. As with Screens Against the Sky, An Immaculate Figure was well received by critics and audiences, being described as "a very clever book indeed" (The Guardian) and a novel of "remarkable restraint and subtlety" (West Africa). Bloodlines (1997), Boehmer's third novel, opens a dialogue between contemporary South Africa and an episode in its colonial history, to explore the theme of truth and reconciliation. The novel follows a journalist Andrea Hardy whose partner dies in a Durban bomb blast, interleaving her bereft search for truth with an epistolary story drawn from involvement of Irish nationalists on the Afrikaner side at the siege of Ladysmith (1899–1900). Her investigation leads her first to the bomber's mother and then into his family's "Coloured" ancestry—a genealogy on which, however, the two women retain separate narratorial perspectives. The novel, described by J. M. Coetzee as "an engrossing and intriguingly told chapter in anti-imperial history", was supported by an Arts Council Writer's Award, and was shortlisted for the Sanlam Prize. People of mixed racial heritage are defined in Bloodlines in terms of their interrogatory relationship to the past. They “know history isn't straight”, a meandering motif which is reprised archaeologically in the riverine locale of Boehmer's fourth novel. Nile Baby (2008) is a story of migrancy grounded within a carefully drawn English suburban pastoral, where the unearthing of a Nubian skeleton in a Roman grave testifies to the ancient but unacknowledged legacy of Africans in Europe. The narrative revolves around two children who “liberate” a century-old foetus preserved in the specimen collection of their school laboratory. Sensing that they have stirred a ghost, they embark on "a strange and often unsettling odyssey across England" (The Times Literary Supplement) in search of its rightful resting-place. During their journey they are helped by a series of adults who each (although its true origin is never confirmed) identify the baby as African, and who invest its fate with their own stories. Boehmer has described the novel as a dialogue not only with two of the writers most important to her, Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe, but also with the women who gave interviews to her on miscarriage. The novel, extensively and positively reviewed, has been taught in English schools. Boehmer's characteristic fluency in interweaving the personal with the political also undergirds her fifth and most recent novel, The Shouting in the Dark (2015), which won the Olive Schreiner Prize in 2019 and was long-listed for the Sunday Times Barry Ronge prize. Like Screens Against the Sky and Bloodlines, the novel traces a young woman's trajectory of redemptive self-discovery against the violence of both the family and the nation. Set in and near Durban during the 1970s, the narrative revolves around the protagonist's relationships with her abusive father and her neurotic, ineffectual mother. The title derives from a crucial, early scene in which the former is glimpsed shouting obscenities into the night sky: In Braemar, once night falls, strange wild cries leap from the father's mouth. Swaddled in a scarf of Rothman's Plain smoke, he sits on the verandah as if keeping watch, a tumbler of brown liquid on the rattan table beside him. The words he once spoke to the starry sky in his ordinary voice, back on the porch in Durban, now come out as shouts, raw noises that tear at his smoker's lungs. 'Idioot,' he shouts, ‘Klootzak! Keep on, now, keep on!' The mother leaves him to it. After dinner she goes straight to their bedroom, tugs the door closed behind her with a click. As she matures into a young woman, Ella must navigate both physical violence and the weight of wartime memory, Dutch heritage, European colonial history, and the racial ideology it carries in order to forge her own independent identity and subjectivity. Reminiscent of the story of John in J. M. Coetzee's Boyhood, Ella's story is of resilience in the face of oppression, one that charts the growth of a creative, political, and profoundly human consciousness. Coetzee himself has described The Shouting in the Dark as a "story, as disturbing as it is enthralling, of a girl's struggle to emerge from under the dead weight of her father's oppression while at the same time searching for a secure footing in the moral chaos of South Africa of the apartheid era". As Ashley Davis concludes in her review for The Scotsman, The Shouting in the Dark is a “dense, disturbing but ultimately optimistic book”. A new, Australian edition of the novel was brought out by UWA Publishing in February 2019, and a translation into Dutch, Op de veranda, in 2015 (Cossee). Chinese translations of Bloodlines and Nile Baby appeared in 2024. Summarizing the significance of her literary output, the noted postcolonial critic Simon Gikandi has argued that Boehmer's novels are often about heroines trapped in their privileged worlds and closed off from the larger political world around them. These novels are driven by a powerful rhetoric of failure and their characters struggle with the limits set by a world they find difficult to name or transcend, yet one that they cannot identify with. In her novels, as in her academic work in postcolonial literature, Boehmer constantly works to overcome the culture of guilt that has been associated with liberal white South African writers and to think through the possibility of making black consciousness itself a part of white writing. While her novels are often about the enclosures of a privileged white culture, their characters strive to define themselves against the political movements associated with Steve Biko and the black consciousness movement of the 1970s. Terence Cave argues that the "strikingly original structure" of Boehmer's fiction creates a "slow-burn effect" for the reader through which emotional and political truths steadily unfold. In 2010, Boehmer published a collection of short stories, Sharmilla, and Other Portraits. The collection has been translated into Italian and in part into Dutch. A second collection entitled To the Volcano, and other stories appeared from Myriad Editions in 2019. Anjali Joseph in the TLS saw the "memorably lifelike" stories as reminiscent of Jean Rhys's fiction. J. M. Coetzee hailed their "passion and intelligence". "Supermarket Love", which appears in the second volume, was commended for the Australian Book Review's Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.

Boehmer is Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. She teaches postcolonial literature and theory at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, Oxford; supervises Masters and doctoral students there; convenes, with Professors Ankhi Mukherjee and Pablo Mukherjee, the Oxford Postcolonial and World Literature Seminar; is on the editorial boards of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and other journals; and is General Editor of Oxford University Press's series "Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures". Boehmer took over the role of Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing from Professor Dame Hermione Lee in 2017 and is now the Executive Director. Founded in 2011 at Wolfson College, the Centre is an international hub for work on life-writing, and offers a variety of Visiting Scholarships, Doctoral Studentships, and Research Fellowships. There, Boehmer convenes and co-organises talks and workshops related to the practice of and research into the genre, especially with reference to the Global South. Boehmer was Principal Investigator of the John Fell-funded "Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds" project, which explored the question of how we read Black British and British Asian writing. The related website, Writers Make Worlds, features the work of leading British writers. She is also co-convener of Oxford's TORCH-funded "Race and Resistance in the Long Nineteenth Century" network. In 2014–16, she was a recipient of the Leverhulme International Network Grant for the network Planned Violence: Post/colonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature. The essay collection Planned Violence came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2018, co-edited with Dominic Davies. Boehmer is a trustee of the Charlie Perkins Scholarships, an Australian-British organisation established in 2010, named after activist Charlie Perkins, which funds the postgraduate study of Aboriginal Australian students at Oxford and Cambridge. Since 2016, she is also a Rhodes Trustee. She was the founding chair, in 1988, of Rhodes Scholars Against Apartheid, and, in the same year, co-established, with Kumi Naidoo, the Bram Fischer Memorial Lecture series. In March 2009, Boehmer gave the M.M. Bhattacharya endowment lectures at the University of Calcutta, Kolkata. In 2014–15, she served as a judge for the Man Booker International Prize. In 2015–17, she was Director of The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), and is now Principal Investigator on the Mellon-funded "Humanities and Identities" project at TORCH. She was the Humanities lead on the UKRI GCRF-funded "Accelerating Achievement for Africa's Adolescents" project, based at the Universities of Oxford and Cape Town, 2019–23. She published several highly-cited articles on narrative-based intervention rising from the workshops that she led. Since 2016, she has continuously held a research attachment at the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide, and was an international visitor at the university in 2024.

• Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1995, 2nd edn 2005) • Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2002) • Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation. Manchester: Manchester University Press (2005) • Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2008) • Indian Arrivals, 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2015) • Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings. London: Palgrave Macmillan (2018)

• Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1998) • Scouting for Boys, Robert Baden-Powell. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2004), second edition (2018) • J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory (with Robert Eaglestone and Katy Iddiols). London: Continuum (2009) • Terror and the Postcolonial (with Stephen Morton). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (2010) • The Postcolonial Low Countries: Literature, Colonialism, and Multiculturalism (with Sarah de Mul). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books (2012) • Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature and Culture (with Dominic Davies). London: Palgrave Macmillan (2018) • Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere (with Katherine Collins). London: Bloomsbury (2024)

• Screens Against The Sky. London: Bloomsbury (1990) • An Immaculate Figure. London: Bloomsbury (1993) • Bloodlines. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers (1997) • Nile Baby. Banbury: Ayebia Clarke (2008) • Sharmilla, and Other Portraits. Johannesburg: Jacana (2010) • The Shouting in the Dark. Dingwall: Inverness: Sandstone Press (2015) • To the Volcano, and other stories. Brighton: Myriad Editions (2019)