
Elleke Boehmer is the author of the novels Screens against the Sky (short-listed David Hyam Prize, 1990), Bloodlines (shortlisted SANLAM prize), Nile Baby (2008) and The Shouting in the Dark (2015), as well as the short-story collection Sharmilla and Other Portraits (2010). Her fiction probes the delicate interface between our private and public selves in haunting and unforgettable ways.
She is also Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a founding figure in the field of postcolonial literature. Her edition of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys was a 2004 summer bestseller, and her acclaimed biography of Nelson Mandela (2008) has been translated into Arabic, Malaysian, Thai, Kurdish, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. She has published several other books including Stories of Women (2005), the anthology Empire Writing (1998), Postcolonial Poetics (2018) and Indian Arrivals: Networks of British Empire (2015).