TABISH KHAIR
Born and educated in the town of Gaya, in Bihar, India, TABISH KHAIR is the author of various books, including the poetry collections, Where Parallel Lines Meet (Penguin, 2000) and Man of Glass (HarperCollins, 2010), the studies, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Indian English Novels (Oxford UP, 2001), The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness (Palgrave, 2010), The New Xenophobia (OUP, 2016) and the novels, The Bus Stopped (Picador, 2004), Filming (Picador, 2007), The Thing About Thugs (Harpercollins, 2010; Houghton Mifflin, 2012), How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (Interlink and Corsair 2014), Just Another Jihadi Jane (Periscope and Interlink, 2016/17), which was published as Jihadi Jane in India (Penguin, 2016), and Night of Happiness (Picador, 2018). Other Routes, an anthology of pre-modern travel texts by Africans and Asians, co-edited and introduced by Khair (with a foreword by Amitav Ghosh) was published by Signal Books and Indiana University Press in 2005 and 2006 respectively. He has also edited or co-edited other scholarly works.
His honours and prizes include the All India Poetry Prize (awarded by the Poetry Society and the British Council) and honorary fellowship (for creative writing) of the Baptist University of Hong Kong. He has been writer in residence at York University, UK, and visiting fellow or guest professor at Cambridge University and Leeds University, UK; Delhi University, JNU, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi (India), IIT Bhubaneswar (India), etc. His novels have been shortlisted for 16 prestigious prizes in five countries, including the Man Asian Literary Prize, the DSC Prize and the Encore Award, and translated into several languages. Two of his books (one fiction and the other non-fiction) have also been shortlisted for India's main book prize offered by the National Academy of Arts, the Sahitya Akademi Award.
His writing has appeared in various anthologies of poetry and fiction, including The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry, City Improbable: Writings on Delhi, The New Anthem, Fear Factor: Terror Incognito, Delhi Noir and Penguin's 60 Indian Poets. Academic papers, reviews, essays, fiction and poems by Khair have appeared in Indian (Hindu, Times of India, Biblio: A Review of Books, Indian Book Review, Economic Times, PEN, DNA, Telegraph, Outlook etc), British (Guardian, New Left Review, Wasafiri, Third Text, Independent, New Statesman, First Post, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, London Magazine, P.N. Review, Salt, Metre, Thumbscrew, Stand etc), Danish (Information, Politiken, Weekendavisen etc), American, German, Italian, South African, Chinese and other publications. Khair writes regularly for the Hindu (India), and for Wasafiri (UK) and the Massachusetts Review (USA).
Several recent books on contemporary Indian writing, including Bruce King's 'Rewriting India: Eight Writers' (Oxford UP, 2014), discuss Khair's work in detail. Two collections of essays on Khair's poetry and fiction have also been edited and published by Om Prakash Dwivedi and Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández.
Khair now mostly lives in a village off the town of Aarhus, Denmark.
ELLEKE BOEHMER
Elleke Boehmer, BA (Hons), MPhil (Oxon), DPhil (Oxon), FRSL FRHistS FEA, is Professor of World Literature in English in the English Faculty, University of Oxford. She is the Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW) and Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College.
Elleke Boehmer is a founding figure in the field of colonial and postcolonial literary studies, and internationally known for her research in the anglophone literatures of empire and anti-empire. Her writing straddles a range of forms and genres, including cultural history, fiction, criticism, and life-writing. She is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Society and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from Linnaeus University, Sweden.
In 2020-21, Elleke Boehmer is a British Academy Senior Research Fellow working on Southern Imagining, a major literary and cultural history about perceptions of the southern hemisphere. The study interweaves Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Herman Melville alongside J.M. Coetzee, Benito Lynch, Zakes Mda, and Alexis Wright, among many other southern writers.
Elleke is the Humanities lead on the GCRF UKRI funded Accelerating Achievement for Africa’s Adolescents Hub (Accelerate Hub), 2019-23, and is involved in exploring the role of narrative and intervention in a range of African contexts. See The Conversation article Better access to stories can improve adolescent lives in Africa. The photograph (left) shows the 'Narrative and Adolescence' March 2020 workshop group.
Professor Boehmer is the PI on the widely-cited website Writers Make Worlds, an open educational resource for Black and Asian writing in Britaintoday. The website grew out of the Fell-funded Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds project (2016-18) which asked how our reading of British literature works as a dynamic medium through which new ways of thinking about Britain, and Britain in the world can be shaped.
Elleke Boehmer was the second Director of TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities), 2015-17, and PI on the Andrew W. Mellon-funded 'Humanities and Identities' project, 2017-18. She convenes with Professor Ankhi Mukherjee the internationally renowned Postcolonial Writing and Theory seminar which meets fortnightly in term.
Boehmer’s research explores issues of migration, identity, reception, nation, race and gender representation; and world literature and postcolonial debates, particularly relating to sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and contemporary Britain. Postcolonial Poetics (2018), Boehmer’s sixth monograph, is a study of how we read postcolonial and world literatures today, and how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book asks how postcolonial texts might offer ways not only of representing but of thinking through postcolonial identities.
Her Indian Arrivals 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire (2015) was a critical historical investigation of South Asian contributions to British literary, social, cultural and political life in the period 1870-1915. Indian Arrivals won the ESSE biennial prize (2015-16).
Elleke Boehmer’s most recent fiction is The Shouting in the Dark(2015 and 2019), co-winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize for Prose, 2018. To the Volcano (2019) is her second book of short stories, commended for the Australian Review of Books Elizabeth Jolley Prize, and longlisted for the Edgehill Prize. For more on Elleke Boehmer's fiction please visit www.ellekeboehmer.com.
Left: Elleke's monograph Indian Arrivals discusses the Modernist friends and collaborators, William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore, here seen meeting on 7 July 1912.
A mother-tongue speaker of Netherlands, Elleke is interested in comparative inter-relations between colonial, postcolonial and migrant writing in English and Dutch, as captured in The Postcolonial Low Countries, edited with Dr Sarah de Mul. In 2021 she will publish two essays on the ‘Dutch Conrad’ Louis Couperus, co-written with Dr Coen van ‘t Veer (Leiden).
Elleke Boehmer is the General Editor of the successful Series, Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures (OUP). Series titles include: Postcolonial Poetry in English by Rajeev Patke (2006), and Postcolonial Life Writing by Gillian Whitlock (2016). East African Literatures by Russell West-Pavlov is the latest title in the series.