Elleke’s short story ‘Supermarket Love’ has been commended by the judges of the 2019 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize out of a long-list of ten. Elleke will fly to Melbourne to attend the awards ceremony on 11 September 2019.
Category: News
The Shouting in the Dark wins the Olive Schreiner Award for Prose!
We are delighted that Elleke’s 2015 novel, The Shouting in the Dark, has been awarded the English Academy of Southern Africa’s Olive Schreiner Award for Prose.
Elleke will be presented with the award on 7 September 2019 in Johannesburg.
ACLALS Auckland 2019 keynote and To the Volcano book launch
Elleke is at the 2019 ACLALS conference in Auckland, where she will give a keynote address and launch her new book of short stories, To The Volcano.
The keynote, entitled “On Decolonization: the radical power of literary thinking”, will take place at 9am on Tuesday, 16 July 2019, with the book launch following over lunch the same day at 1pm.
Keynote abstract:
Many humanities disciplines including literary studies have been rocked in recent times by movements to decolonize the syllabus—to open curricula to writing from ‘the outside’, including the global margins, or to the commons in its broadest sense. For many, these moves have been seen as affronting and even alarming, threatening our understanding of literature as it has conventionally been received and taught. In this talk I want rather to suggest that decolonization represents an opportunity, an opening and shaking of settled perceptions. Moves to decolonize are particularly an opportunity for those of us involved in writing and reading texts, perhaps especially postcolonial texts, because of what I call the radical power of literary thinking. In the body of the talk I will explore in more detail what I mean by this, drawing on work by Mzobe, Okorafor, Evaristo, and others.
New review of Indian Arrivals in Victorian Studies
A new review of Indian Arrivals has been published in the Winter 2019 issue of Victorian Studies (vol. 61, no. 2). Some highlights from Sukanya Banerjee’s review:
Focussing especially on poetry, Boehmer’s study reorients our reading of the Anglo-Indian metropolitan encounter in ways that will have significant bearing not only on our study of colonial relations …. , but also on our reckoning of literary history.
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The literary and formal dimensions of metropolitan collaborations need more critical attention, an endeavour that this book invites.
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This double temporality adds resonance to the book and serves as an instance of the writerly touch with which it is written (Boehmer is also an acclaimed novelist). Indeed, while Indian Arrivals offers much with which to engage, it also makes for very engaging reading. It twins impressive archival research with an imaginative handling of the material.
doi: 10.2979/victorianstudies.61.2.40
Elleke Boehmer has become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
We’re delighted to announce that Elleke Boehmer was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature on Monday 24 June 2019. Elleke signed her name alongside those of the other new Fellows, including celebrated writers Mary Beard, Stephen Fry, Vahni Capildeo and Monica Ali.
The Royal Society of Literature has some 600 Fellows. They include the very best novelists, short-story writers, poets, playwrights, biographers, historians, travel writers, literary critics and scriptwriters at work today. (Royal Society of Literature website)
Master Class and Lecture: Postcolonial Poetics and Decolonizing the Academy at the University of Amsterdam
Elleke Boehmer will give a master class and lecture on “Postcolonial Poetics and Decolonizing the Academy” at the University of Amsterdam in May.
This event takes the form of, firstly, a 2-hour masterclass led by Elleke Boehmer, aimed mainly at graduate students, focusing on the issues raised in the introduction and first chapter of Postcolonial Poetics, including the question of how to bring together the political and the aesthetic qualities of postcolonial writing. Secondly, Professor Boehmer will give a 1-hour lecture (including time for questions) under the title ‘We Need to Talk about Decolonization (again)’. This lecture will build on topics touched upon in Postcolonial Poetics to explore the pressing question of the state of decolonization in the contemporary academy.
New review of Postcolonial Poetics in the THE
Jenni Ramone has written a glowing review of Postcolonial Poetics in the Times Higher Education supplement.
A couple of highlights:
Elleke Boehmer’s Postcolonial Poetics invites us to be fearless readers. She wants us to enjoy the process of allowing the text to “mould, shape, and reshape our understanding”. This, driven by readings of prominent novelists (Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, J. M. Coetzee, Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie) alongside essayists, poets and short story writers (Warsan Shire, Mongane Serote, M. NourbeSe Philip), makes for a liberating reading experience. Positioned as alert readers, we are reminded that, in order to learn from postcolonial texts, we don’t have to do intrusive things to them. Instead, Postcolonial Poetics offers strategies to reconnect with the surface aesthetics – textual patterns and flows, discontinuities and wit – that are particular features of postcolonial writing.
Boehmer’s book is … a vindication of postcolonial studies and of the potential of postcolonial literature to change the world. She agrees with Okri’s suggestion that the writer’s task is to remake the world, and sees the potential of the reader to activate the work’s resistant power.
To the Volcano, and other stories available for preorder
In more exciting news for 2019, Elleke Boehmer’s new collection of short stories will be published by Myriad later this year.
These assured, accomplished stories are reports from a world in which unacknowledged dark energies undermine and render hollow our bright, rational self-understanding. With passion and intelligence, and rare moral insight, Elleke Boehmer traces the scars left on the psyche by the tortuous histories of the South.
J. M. Coetzee
Read more and preorder the book on Myriad’s site:
TORCH Book at Lunchtime: Postcolonial Poetics
Postcolonial Poetics will be featured as the Book at Lunchtime at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) on 30 January 2019.
Elleke will be joined an expert panel to discuss the book and its themes, the panel will include:
Professor Jane Hiddleston (Exeter College, Oxford)
Professor Ben Morgan (Worcester College, Oxford)
Professor Richard Drayton (King’s College London)
Dr Malachi McIntosh (Runnymede Trust)
Professor Robert Young (NYU)
The event is free and available to all, but booking is essential. Lunch will be provided from 12.30pm, and the discussion begins at 1pm.
Australian edition of The Shouting in the Dark to be published in February 2019 by UWA Publishing
We are very excited to announce that the Australian edition of The Shouting in the Dark will be published by UWA Publishing in February 2019 as The Shouting in the Dark & other southern writing.
Besides the beautiful new cover, readers can expect some exciting additions in this edition of the novel:
Read more and preorder your copyThe Shouting in the Dark is Ella’s story of surviving childhood and mapping new belonging. This Australian edition includes a new preface by the author, an interview that sets the book in relation to other stories of migration in the south, and selected writing by Elleke Boehmer about living in, navigating, and gravitating back to the southern hemisphere.