Elleke Boehmer, FRSL, FRHistS (born 1961) is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College.

With her fiction, Boehmer has established an international reputation as a commentator on the impacts and aftereffects of colonial history, in particular in post-apartheid South Africa and postcolonial Britain.

Elleke Boehmer was born to Dutch parents in Durban, South Africa, in what she has called the "balmy interstitial zone" where the littoral cultures of the Indian Ocean meet in an African city.

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).

Her central argument is that rather than simply being a reflection of social and political reality, literature is actively engaged in processes of colonisation, decolonisation, and post-independence national identity formation, all, in many respects, “textual undertaking[s]".

[5] After tracing the textual construction of empire through a series of close literary readings of popular genres (such as the missionary and explorer travelogue, the adventure romance, the imperial Gothic tale, and the Victorian “domestic” novel) and writers (including Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Olive Schreiner, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot), she then explores how writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wilson Harris, Jamaica Kincaid, Ben Okri, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o have navigated the dialectic of colonial history and post-independence nationalism through their attention to questions of lost cultural heritage, fragmented memory, hybridity, and language.

[11] Focusing on Africa and South Asia, and critically engaging with theorists such as Benedict Anderson, Fredric Jameson, Partha Chatterjee, and Frantz Fanon, she traces such gendered constructions and deconstructions in a range of texts by, among others, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, Arundhati Roy, Manju Kapur, and Tsitsi Dangarembga.

Beyond merely providing a short biography of the South African icon, this Introduction outlines his multiple national and international resonances as “a universal symbol of social justice […], an exemplary figure connoting non-racialism and democracy, [and] a moral giant".

Postcolonial literatures, Boehmer argues, are particularly suited to evoking such a response due to their characteristic interest in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings.

Coetzee in Theory and Context (2009), edited with Robert Eaglestone and Katy Iddiols, comprises critical essays on the 2003 South African Nobel Laureate by a range of leading scholars and novelists.

Taken as an interrelated whole, Boehmer's research has not only helped shape the fields of world imperial history, global south understanding, and Postcolonial Studies, but has also opened up crucial new directions for the future of each.

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.

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).

[15] 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.

[16] 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.

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.

[19] 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.

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".

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.

[21] 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.

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.