Book Launch
Date: 26/05/2026
Time: 17:30
Location: Leonard Wolfson Auditorium
Join Professor Elleke Boehmer, who will discuss her two new books, Ice Shock (2025) and Southern Imagining (2025), in conversation with Professor Dame Hermione Lee. Together, these works ask how we keep distant people and places in mind — and why that act of attention matters.
Described by The New Yorker as ‘a lyrical study of global literature’, in Southern Imagining, Boehmer challenges the dominance of northern perspectives by exploring how the world looks when viewed from the far south. Drawing on literary and scientific writing — from early Indigenous knowledge systems to figures such as Jorge Luis Borges and Katherine Mansfield—she asks what it means to inhabit the southern hemisphere imaginatively, and how reading might reshape our sense of the planet and our place within it.
How do we imagine and remain connected to distant lives and environments, and what does it mean to write across such distances — geographical, emotional, and planetary?
Her novel Ice Shock turns to intimacy at a different scale. Set against the backdrop of melting ice caps, it follows two young lovers separated across the planet — one at an Antarctic research station, the other in England — as they navigate distance, climate crisis, and the fragility of connection. As Jason Allen-Paisant writes, Ice Shock is ‘a propulsive and eerie love story […] beneath surfaces that shift constantly like the melting ice floes of the characters’ worlds’.
How might literature reshape our sense of proximity, belonging, and care in a rapidly changing world?
Speaker Details:
Professor Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English in the Oxford English Faculty, and Executive Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. She is a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and of the Royal Historical Society. She is an Extraordinary Visiting Professor at the University of Pretoria. In 2024, she held an International Visiting Fellowship award at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Elleke has published biography, fiction, history and criticism. Her fiction includes To the Volcano, and other stories (2019; commended Elizabeth Jolley Prize), and The Shouting in the Dark (winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize 2018). Her non-fiction includes Postcolonial Poetics (2018), Indian Arrivals 1870-1915 (2015; winner of the biennial ESSE prize 2016) and Nelson Mandela (2008, 2023). Her work has been widely translated. Ice Shock is her sixth novel.
Professor Dame Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a literary biographer, and her work includes Lives of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the James Tait Black prize for biography), Tom Stoppard (2020), and Anita Brookner (forthcoming, September 2026). She has also written books on life-writing including a Very Short Introduction to Biography, a collection of essays, Body Parts, and (with Kate Kennedy) Lives of Houses. In 2023 she was made GBE for services to English Literature. She founded OCLW in 2011.
Further Details and Contacts:
Join us after the event for a wine reception and book sale by Caper.
This event is free and open to all. Delivering our lectures costs the Centre around £20 per attendee. If you are able, please consider making a voluntary donation of £5, £10, or £20 to help us cover these costs and keep our events accessible to all. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Registration is strongly recommended. Registration will close at 14:30 on 26/05/2026.
The event will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording.
Book Launch
Date: 26/05/2026
Time: 17:30
Location: Leonard Wolfson Auditorium
Join Professor Elleke Boehmer, who will discuss her two new books, Ice Shock (2025) and Southern Imagining (2025), in conversation with Professor Dame Hermione Lee. Together, these works ask how we keep distant people and places in mind — and why that act of attention matters.
Described by The New Yorker as ‘a lyrical study of global literature’, in Southern Imagining, Boehmer challenges the dominance of northern perspectives by exploring how the world looks when viewed from the far south. Drawing on literary and scientific writing — from early Indigenous knowledge systems to figures such as Jorge Luis Borges and Katherine Mansfield—she asks what it means to inhabit the southern hemisphere imaginatively, and how reading might reshape our sense of the planet and our place within it.
How do we imagine and remain connected to distant lives and environments, and what does it mean to write across such distances — geographical, emotional, and planetary?
Her novel Ice Shock turns to intimacy at a different scale. Set against the backdrop of melting ice caps, it follows two young lovers separated across the planet — one at an Antarctic research station, the other in England — as they navigate distance, climate crisis, and the fragility of connection. As Jason Allen-Paisant writes, Ice Shock is ‘a propulsive and eerie love story […] beneath surfaces that shift constantly like the melting ice floes of the characters’ worlds’.
How might literature reshape our sense of proximity, belonging, and care in a rapidly changing world?
Speaker Details:
Professor Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English in the Oxford English Faculty, and Executive Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. She is a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and of the Royal Historical Society. She is an Extraordinary Visiting Professor at the University of Pretoria. In 2024, she held an International Visiting Fellowship award at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Elleke has published biography, fiction, history and criticism. Her fiction includes To the Volcano, and other stories (2019; commended Elizabeth Jolley Prize), and The Shouting in the Dark (winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize 2018). Her non-fiction includes Postcolonial Poetics (2018), Indian Arrivals 1870-1915 (2015; winner of the biennial ESSE prize 2016) and Nelson Mandela (2008, 2023). Her work has been widely translated. Ice Shock is her sixth novel.
Professor Dame Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a literary biographer, and her work includes Lives of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the James Tait Black prize for biography), Tom Stoppard (2020), and Anita Brookner (forthcoming, September 2026). She has also written books on life-writing including a Very Short Introduction to Biography, a collection of essays, Body Parts, and (with Kate Kennedy) Lives of Houses. In 2023 she was made GBE for services to English Literature. She founded OCLW in 2011.
Further Details and Contacts:
Join us after the event for a wine reception and book sale by Caper.
This event is free and open to all. Delivering our lectures costs the Centre around £20 per attendee. If you are able, please consider making a voluntary donation of £5, £10, or £20 to help us cover these costs and keep our events accessible to all. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Registration is strongly recommended. Registration will close at 14:30 on 26/05/2026.
The event will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording.
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