Simone Oettli-van Delden

Bio Note:

Simone Oettli-van Delden obtained MA (Hons) at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. She taught English Literature at the University of Auckland and co-edited Fragments of a World: A Collection of Photographs by New Zealand Women. (Dunedin: McIndoe, 1976). Then she married and moved to Switzerland, where she had two sons and continued her studies at the University of Geneva. She has been teaching English and Postcolonial literature since 1980.

She completed an interdisciplinary Diplôme des études supérieures in Etudes Féminines, as well as a PhD. Her doctoral thesis concerns postcolonial women writers and is entitled The Rhetoric of Madness: Reading the Work of Janet Frame, Jean Rhys and Bessie Head. Her book, Surfaces of Strangeness: Janet Frame and the Rhetoric of Madness was published in Wellington, by Victoria University Press in 2003. She has given conference papers and published articles on Janet Frame, Katherine Mansfield, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Alan Duff, Robert Barclay, and Michael Ayrton. Most recent publications include 'Janet Frame's Conceptualization of the Writing Process: From The Lagoon to Mirror City.' Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Vol.33, N°2, Spring 2011 and ‘Representations of Childhood in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield and Witi Ihimaera.’ in Antipodean Childhoods: Growing Up in Australia and New Zealand. Eds. Ramsey-Kurz, Helga and Ulla Ratheiser. Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 2010. Her current research focuses on Katherine Mansfield, and Maori and Pacific literature, but more general interests include the 19th & 20th Century, in particular the Modernist period. She organised the conference In the Footsteps of Katherine Mansfield, in Montana, Switzerland, in September, 2012. At present she writes book reviews for Landfall and is editing a collection of essays on Katherine Mansfield.