J. M. Coetzee

J. M. Coetzee, born in 1940, South African novelist and scholar, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in literature. Coetzee’s novels often use allegory to examine the apartheid regime—and post-apartheid transition—of South Africa, and to explore the resulting effects of these policies on individuals and society.

John Michael Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa. His father was a lawyer and his mother a schoolteacher. Although Coetzee spoke Afrikaans (the language of a majority of the white population in South Africa) with relatives, he grew up in an English-speaking household and attended English-language schools. He graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1961 with degrees in literature and mathematics, and in 1962 he left South Africa for England, where he worked as a computer programmer. In 1965 Coetzee went to the United States, and four years later he received a Ph.D. degree in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. While he was completing his dissertation in 1968 and 1969, Coetzee began working as an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He returned to South Africa in 1971. Coetzee became a lecturer at the University of Cape Town in 1972, an assistant professor in 1980, and a professor of general literature in 1984. In 1986 and again in 1989 he taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

When Coetzee returned to South Africa he completed work on two novellas he had already begun, which were published in one volume as Dusklands in 1974. Both novellas, The Vietnam Project and The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee, deal with the dilemmas faced by individuals who are in conflict with society. Dusklands was followed by In the Heart of the Country (1977; published the same year in the United States as From the Heart of the Country), which is structured as the diary of a woman declining into insanity. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), the story of a government magistrate's personal evolution into questioning the government for which he works, won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency (CNA) Literary Award.

Coetzee’s next book, Life and Times of Michael K (1983), was the story of a man’s physical and psychological journey through a country at war. The novel won the Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literary award. Sixteen years later Coetzee became the first writer to win the honor twice with Disgrace (1999), which tells the story of a man coping with dismissal from his college teaching job and the brutal gang rape of his adult daughter. The book aroused controversy in South Africa, with some critics denouncing it as racist.

In 2002 Coetzee moved to Australia. The following year he published Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons, a novel about the life of an Australian writer. That year he became the fourth African writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature, following Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, Egypt’s Naguib Mahfouz, and South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer. The award announcement called Coetzee a “scrupulous doubter” with a “capacity for empathy that has enabled Coetzee time and again to creep beneath the skin of the alien and the abhorrent.”

Coetzee’s other novels include Foe (1986), Age of Iron (1990), The Master of Saint Petersburg (1994), Slow Man (2005), and Diary of a Bad Year (2007). Among his books of essays are Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1994), Giving Offense (1996), Stranger Shores (2001), and Inner Workings (2007). He has published two volumes of memoirs, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). Coetzee has also translated the works of other authors into Dutch, German, French, and Afrikaans.