Elleke Boehmer

Biography

Elleke Boehmer (BA Hons., Rhodes, South Africa; M.Phil., D. Phil. St John’s College, Oxford) is Oxford University’s first professor in world literature in English, and Executive Director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, Wolfson College. She is an internationally recognised colonial, postcolonial and world literature specialist with prominent southern hemisphere interests. She is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, both 2019. Boehmer has published six monographs to date, with the seventh, Southern Imagining: a literary and cultural history of the far southern hemisphere, forthcoming with Princeton UP in late 2025. Her monograph, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995; 2nd edn. 2005) is an Oxford University Press best-seller and remains a set text across the Anglophone world, while the Mandarin translation is a primary text in curricula in China. Her biography Nelson Mandela (OUP, 2008) is translated into several languages including Arabic, Portuguese, Malaysian and Thai. A second edition marked the 10th anniversary of Mandela’s death. She has edited or co-edited over ten collections in the fields of postcolonial and world literatures, including J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory (2009). As a creative writer, Boehmer is the author to date of six novels and two collections of short stories, the latest novel being Ice Shock (2025). Her oeuvre of critical and creative writing has been recognised by prestigious awards and honours including the Olive Schreiner Prize, 2019 (for The Shouting in the Dark); a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship, 2019-21; the ESSE biennial Prize for Literature in English, 2015-16, for her monograph Indian Arrivals (OUP, 2015), and Leverhulme and AHRC research awards.

Elleke Boehmer was a Rhodes Scholar, 1985-8, and since 2016 is a Rhodes Trustee. She was a judge of the International Man Booker Prize, 2014-15, and holds an honorary doctorate from Linnaeus University, Sweden. In 2022 she was made an Honorary Fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford, cited for her award-winning work in both criticism and creative writing. Professor Boehmer is a Member of the South African Academy, and in 2020 was elected to the Dutch Society of Letters. She was the Director of the Oxford Centre for the Humanities (TORCH, 2015-18), and served as the sole Humanities lead on the £20M UKRI-GCRF ‘Accelerating Achievement for African Adolescents’ Hub (2019-23). In 2018 she established the Oxford Global South Fellowship program, for which she secured major Andrew W. Mellon funding. In 2020 and 2025, she was a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS), and, since 2023, has been an Extraordinary Professor in English at the
University of Pretoria. In respect of Australian literary studies, Boehmer brings a comparative perspective informed by the social, literary and cultural histories of Southern imaginaries and the Global South to the field. In 2024, she held the inaugural International Visiting Fellowship award at the University of Adelaide. She is a long-time member (since 2014) of the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the same University. She was a visiting fellow in the School of History, ANU, Canberra, attached to the National Centre of Biography, 2017-18, and has given many keynote talks and lectures in Australia. Throughout her career, she has sought to mentor young scholars, including as a UK trustee of the Aurora Foundation which awards scholarships to young Indigenous Australians to study at prestigious universities abroad. Her short story ‘Supermarket Love’ was commended for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize, 2019. Boehmer is the newly appointed General Editor of the new Edinburgh
Critical Studies in South-South Literary Entanglements Series, 2025. She is delighted to be Patron of the Katherine Mansfield Society (2025- ).