Book Launch: Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere

Elleke Boehmer and Katherine Collins (editors), Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere: Texts, Spaces, Resonances (2024)

Ranging across the Southern Hemisphere, from Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia in South America, through southern Africa, to Australia and New Zealand and as far down as Antarctica, this collection brings together writers and scholars in the oceanic humanities, postcolonial, Global South and polar studies. The essays present works on human, animal and plant life captured in words, music, performance, visual arts and photography. Interdisciplinary and vast in its comparative range, Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere convenes a diversity of perspectives and positions that demonstrate that the South has rich internal knowledge sources of its own, including different forms of life writing, allowing us to better conceptualise the planet ‘from below’.

Hear from the collection’s editors and four of the contributors on how artists have interpreted Scott’s famous Terra Nova hut, ‘tsunami, tornados, and tides’ in Amitav Ghosh’s non-fiction; the watery resonances in Dambudzo Marechera’s famous novel House of Hunger; and remote poetic imaginings of Antarctica.

Speaker Details:

Dr Charne Lavery is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria. Her research is focused on the ways in which people imagine the sea and the South, including the Indian Ocean world, the deep ocean and the Antarctic region. She co-directs with Isabel Hofmeyr, the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South research platform (www.oceanichumanities.com). Her publications include Writing Ocean Worlds: Indian Ocean Fiction in English (Palgrave 2021) and the co-edited collections Maritime Mobilities in Anglophone Literature and Culture (Palgrave 2023), Reading from the South (Wits Press 2023), and Reading for Water (Routledge 2024). She serves as Principal Investigator on a South African National Research Foundation grant to pilot an African Antarctic Artists and Writers Programme, and as a South African Humanities and Social Sciences delegate to the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). She is co-editor of the Palgrave series Maritime Literature and Culture, board member of the journals Global Nineteenth-Century Studies and Alizés, and was a Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies (STIAS) research fellow in 2023.

Dr Tinashe Mushakavanhu researches the role of literary culture in documentation, historical knowledge, and political power. He has particular interests in the aesthetics and materiality of writing, archives and archival theory, translation, and African print cultures. His work manifests in interdisciplinary modalities. It blurs creative and critical methods and writing genres in order to imaginatively reconfigure the strictures that conventionally separate the poetic and the theoretical. His publications include Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on a Speculative Archive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) and Some Writers Can Give You Two Heartbeats (Black Chalk & Co., 2019).

Professor Elizabeth Leane is Professor of Antarctic Studies in the School of Humanities, College of Arts, Law and Education. She has a career-long drive to understand how non-specialists can connect with remote or seemingly inaccessible places and ideas. With degrees in both science and literature, she uses the insights of the humanities to understand how humans relate to the Antarctic, the ‘continent for science’. She has visited Antarctica as a writer-in-resident, an educator and a researcher with the Australian, New Zealand and Chilean national programs and with tour operators. Elizabeth currently co-leads (with Katie Marx) the Public Engagement with Antarctic Research Action Group within the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. She is Arts and Literature Editor of The Polar Journal. Her books include Antarctica in Fiction and South Pole: Nature and Culture and the co-edited collections Anthropocene Antarctica and Performing Ice. She is currently leading several large funded projects focused on the Antarctic region, including partnered research with government agencies nationally and internationally, and tourism operators.

Dr Joanna Price is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University. She has written about affect and place, particularly in relation to trauma, memory and mourning. Her recent publications include articles about Antarctica, ' the traumatic sublime’, and affective landscapes in Antarctic travel memoirs. She is currently writing an ‘affective biography’ of R.F. Scott’s Terra Nova hut. This piece explores how, through the life-writing of Apsley Cherry-Garrard and others, the hut is inscribed with a history of feelings. It will form part of a book about how, through literature, art and photography, the material spaces of Antarctica become affective both locally and globally.

Dr Elizabeth Lewis Williams is a poet, teacher and Visiting Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Her creative-critical PhD explored the idea of scientific and poetic measure in Antarctic poetry, and her research interests include representations of Antarctica, the intersections between poetry and science, the poetics of place, and the value of poetry and the poetry workshop in promoting multi-disciplinary dialogue and public engagement, particularly around narratives of climate change. She has published two books of poetry, Deception Island (2021) and Erebus (2022), and toured an immersive poetry-film-sound installation in a replica Antarctic hut. She has been a lecturer on an Antarctic cruise ship, and is currently working on a book of creative non-fiction, Portal Point, about the peculiar nature of Antarctica as a threshold place. She is also part of a group developing a multi-media project, I am your past/Yo soy tu pasado, which aims to put the two ecosystems, Amazonia and Antarctica, in conversation through a series of letters, poems, sound and visual arts, and in collaboration with scientists.

Professor Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English and Executive Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. She is a Fellow of the English Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature, and of the Royal Historical Society. She is a member of the Dutch Society of Letters and a Rhodes Trustee. In 2024 she held an International Visiting Fellowship award at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Elleke has  published biography, history and criticism, including Postcolonial Poetics (2018); Indian Arrivals 1870-1915 (2015; winner of the biennial ESSE prize 2016) and Nelson Mandela (2008, 2023). Southern Imagining, a literary history of the southern hemisphere, her seventh monograph, will appear from Princeton University Press, later in 2025. Elleke Boehmer’s 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 novel Ice Shock is forthcoming.

Dr Katherine Collins is an interdisciplinary researcher at the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College. Her research interests include contemporary life-writing and creative practice as research. Her current project explores arts-science collaboration through Antarctic’ more-than-human’ story-making. She is writing a monograph, Layered forms: metaphor and materiality in story-making, which explores the interplay of forms like rooms, water, light, and spirals in two story-making processes in the UK and South Africa, comparing workshop artefacts with contemporary interdisciplinary artists and writers. She is also a poet, working in Propel Magazine, The Rialto, bath magg, Shearsman Magazine, Finished Creatures, and the anthology Science of the Seas, among others. In 202, her collaboration ‘They multiply their wings’, with composer Christopher Cook, won the Rosamond Prize and in 2023 her poem ‘Islands in silence’ was highly commended in the Plough Prize.

A book sale and wine reception will follow the launch.

This event is free and open to all; however, registration is recommended.

This event will be recorded.

Event Queries and Contacts:

Any queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.