Coetzee << kut SEE >>, J. M. (1940-…), a highly acclaimed South African writer, won the 2003 Nobel Prize in literature. Coetzee also was the first writer to twice win the Booker Prize, the United Kingdom’s highest literary award. Coetzee won the Booker for his novels Life & Times of Michael K in 1983 and Disgrace in 1999. Coetzee writes with brutal honesty about society’s outcasts and outsiders, including those victimized by the former South African system of segregation called apartheid. Many of Coetzee’s characters experience crises in their lives that mirror the larger social crises of the time and place where they live.
Coetzee’s other novels include Dusklands (1974), In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Foe (1986), The Master of Petersburg (1994), Elizabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005), Diary of a Bad Year (2007), The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and its sequels The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) and The Death of Jesus (2019), and The Pole (2023). In addition, Coetzee has written translations and literary criticism. Coetzee’s essays were published in White Writing (1988) and Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996). Selections of Coetzee’s literary criticism were collected in Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999 (2001); Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000-2005 (2007); and Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2018). Coetzee has written three volumes of novelized autobiography—Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997), Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life (2002), and Summertime (2009).
John Michael Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on Feb. 9, 1940. He later changed his middle name to Maxwell. Coetzee earned B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Cape Town in 1960 and 1963, respectively. He received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas in 1969. He was a lecturer in English at the University of Cape Town from 1972 and a professor of general literature there from 1984 until he moved to Australia in 2002. In 2004, he joined the faculty of the University of Adelaide as an honorary research fellow. Coetzee became an Australian citizen in 2006.
See also South African literature (The dilemma of white Africans).
