Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, is both a novelist, and a cultural and literary historian. Her critical and creative work published in 2015 focuses on the Indian Ocean cultural arena, teasing out its entanglements with empire and other global webs. The novel The Shouting in the Dark (Sandstone Press, 2015) crafts a portrait of a lonely girlhood and looks at the suppression of women's voices through its narration of the inner life of a young woman in the 1970s, set against the political chaos of apartheid South Africa. Her cultural history, Indian Arrivals, 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2015), considers the English metropole through Indian intellectual eyes, exploring the rich textures of contact between Indians and Britons on British soil at the height of empire through poetry and travel writing.

Interviewers Diya Gupta and Bárbara Gallego Larrarte are doctoral researchers at King's College London and the University of Oxford respectively. Their conversation with Elleke Boehmer at Shared Futures examined the points of contact between creative and critical modes of thinking and writing.

Diya Gupta (DG):We'd like to begin this interview by considering how rare it is for academics to also be creative writers, particularly novelists – and yet you have received acclaim for both! Would you consider the critical and the creative as oppositional structures of thinking? Or are there intersections? Is it like changing hats?

Elleke Boehmer (EB):This is the question with which my work begins, or that lies at its nerve centre. I used to give a very different answer to this question to the one I give now.

In the past, I used to think that the two kinds of writing came from different parts of my experience and consciousness or ‘brain’. In fact, I wrote creatively and critically at very different times of the day and of the week. The one kind of writing, the creative, seemed to have to be drawn up like water from a deep well, whereas the other kind of writing, the critical, often arose in interaction with the writing of others.