Elleke Boehmer

Expert in world literature Professor Elleke Boehmer says reading can transform our planetary perspective and explores how we look at the world from the south through literary, cultural and scientific material.

Boehmer says a northern perspective is often the default one, while perspectives from southern latitudes including the likes of Argentina, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa are ignored. She looks at writing from across southern continents and islands and considers how we imaginatively inhabit the farthest reaches of the planet. Boehmer says writers such as the Portuguese epic poet Luís de Camöes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Darwin, Katherine Mansfield, Jorge Luis Borges and ancient Indigenous scribes capture the edgy and austere experiences of the far south. And she argues that writers of the south disrupt conventional ways of thinking and invite us to see our globe differently.

Boehmer is professor of world literature in English at the University of Oxford. Her previous books include Indian Arrivals 1870–1915, winner of the ESSE Book Award, a collection of short stories To the Volcano and Other Stories and a novel, The Shouting in the Dark, winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize.