This event is the fourth in the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing / Simon Fraser University Graduate Liberal Studies Jim Babcock Lecture Series in Writing, which will take place in Michaelmas 2024.

Professor Elleke Boehmer will be in conversation with Dr Kate Kennedy on the topic of ‘Writing Fiction; Writing Life’. Their discussion will focus on Elleke’s novel The Shouting in the Dark (2015), and her short stories, in particular her second collection, To the Volcano (2019), and will explore questions of writing across borders and giving voice.

Attendees are encouraged to read the following text in advance of the event:

Elleke Boehmer, The Shouting in the Dark (2015)
Elleke Boehmer, To the Volcano (2019)

Professor Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, a Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College and Executive Director of the Life Writing Centre. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and of the Royal Historical Society. She is also an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. Since 2023, she has been an Extraordinary Professor in English at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and in 2024 she is an International Visitor at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Elleke Boehmer is the author of five novels, including Screens Against the Sky, shortlisted for the David Higham Prize, and The Shouting in the Dark which was winner of the 2018 Olive Schreiner Prize. She has also written two works of short stories, including most recently To the Volcano. She has published six monographs, extending from the field-defining Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995, 2005), to Indian Arrivals 1870-1915 (2015; biennial ESSE prizewinner, 2016) and Postcolonial Poetics (2018). A second edition of her biography Nelson Mandela was published in 2023. Southern Imagining, a literary history of the southern hemisphere, will appear from Princeton University Press in 2025. Her work has been translated into many languages.

Dr Kate Kennedy is a writer, cellist, and BBC broadcaster. Her work combines words and music, in performance, on the radio and on the page. She is a Research Fellow in Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford, and Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. Her most recent book, Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound (2024) is part memoir, part biography: it explores musicians’ relationships to their cellos, and follows her journey with her cello as she traces lives and instruments across Europe and Russia.

This event is free and open to all.