Sue Kossew

I have lived in Zambia, South Africa, the UK and Australia and have degrees from the Universities of Cape Town, East Anglia and New South Wales. My PhD (UNSW) was a postcolonial reading of the works of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink. I have held academic and leadership positions at UNSW and Monash Universities; and have been Distinguished Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen (2009) and R. Marika Chair of Australian Studies at the University of Cologne (2013).

My books include Pen and Power: A Post-colonial Reading of J. M. Coetzee and André Brink (1996), Writing Woman, Writing Place: Australian and South African Fiction (2004), Lighting Dark Places: Essays on Kate Grenville (ed. 2010) and Strong Opinions: J. M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction (co-ed. 2011). Recent publications are Rethinking the Victim: Gender and Violence in Contemporary Australian Women’s Writing with Anne Brewster (Routledge, 2019) and Reading Coetzee’s Women (co-ed, Palgrave, 2019).

I have published numerous book chapters and journal articles on J. M. Coetzee, and on postcolonial, Australian and South African literatures. I was awarded an ARC Discovery Grant entitled "Rethinking the Victim: Gendered Violence in Contemporary Australian Women's Writing" in 2014 with Assoc. Prof. Anne Brewster with whom I am currently researching contemporary Australian women's writing on war.