Professor Elleke Boehmer visited with the National Centre of Biography in February 2017.

She is professor of World Literature in English, in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. She is also Director of The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and Deputy Director of the Oxford Life Writing Centre at Wolfson College. She has written five monographs and five novels, and is a foundational figure in the field of colonial and postcolonial literary studies.

Her monographs include Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005), Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920:Resistance in Interaction (2005, 2002), Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (2005), and the biography of Nelson Mandela (2008). Indian Arrivals 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire (2015) won the ESSE 2016 prize for Literature in English. Her novels include The Shouting in the Dark (2015, long-listed Sunday Times Barry Ronge prize), Screens Again the Sky (1990, short-listed David Hyam Prize, 1990), Bloodlines (1997, shortlisted, Sanlam prize), and Nile Baby (2008). She also published the short-story collection Sharmilla and Other Portraits (2010). A new collection of stories is in progress.

In 2004 she edited the British best-seller Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys and has co-edited several books, including J. M. Coetzee in Writing and Theory (2009), Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion (2009), and the forthcoming Global Histories of Books and Planned Violence (2018). She is the General Editor of the Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series, and was a Man Booker International judge 2013-15. Elleke holds an Honorary Doctorate from Linnaeus University in Sweden.