Dusklands (1974)
His first book: two novellas, one on American propaganda in Vietnam, one on an eighteenth-century Boer explorer
Literature · Novelists
J. M. Coetzee
born 1940 · South African-Australian
Postcolonial and postmodern fiction
J. M. Coetzee was the first novelist to win the Booker Prize twice, in 1983 and 1999, and took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His austere, pared-back novels examine complicity and cruelty under and after apartheid, from a magistrate on the frontier of an unnamed empire to a disgraced Cape Town professor. Famously reticent, he attended neither Booker ceremony, and he moved to Australia in 2002, taking citizenship four years later.
How to spot them
- ▸The first author to win the Booker Prize twice, and he went to neither ceremony
- ▸Nobel laureate 2003; South African by birth, Australian since 2006
- ▸Spare, unadorned prose; allegories set in unnamed empires and unnamed colonies
- ▸Animal rights and vegetarianism argued through the character Elizabeth Costello
- ▸Memoirs written in the third person and the present tense
Key works
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)
A magistrate on the frontier of an unnamed Empire is broken for questioning the torture of nomads; the title comes from a Cavafy poem
Life & Times of Michael K (1983)
A gardener with a harelip wheels his dying mother out of a city at war in a homemade cart; it won his first Booker Prize
Foe (1986)
Susan Barton is cast up on the island of Cruso and Friday, and afterwards tries to get her story written by a Mr Foe
Age of Iron (1990)
A retired classics lecturer dying of cancer writes to her daughter about the townships in the state of emergency
Disgrace (1999)
David Lurie loses his Cape Town post over an affair with a student, and goes to his daughter's smallholding in the Eastern Cape; his second Booker Prize
Elizabeth Costello (2003)
Eight "lessons" delivered as lectures by an ageing Australian novelist, including the argument comparing industrial farming with the Holocaust
Summertime (Scenes from Provincial Life) (2009)
The third of the Scenes from Provincial Life memoirs: a biographer interviews people about a dead writer called John Coetzee
Key ideas
- Complicity: the liberal who opposes the regime but still benefits from it
- The silenced other — Friday's missing tongue in Foe as the limit of the writer's authority
- Animal suffering as a moral emergency, put in the mouth of a fictional lecturer
Quick-fire facts
- •Born John Maxwell Coetzee on 9 February 1940 in Cape Town, to Afrikaner parents who spoke English at home
- •He worked as a computer programmer for IBM in London in the early 1960s
- •His doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin applied computer stylistic analysis to the English prose of Samuel Beckett
- •He won the Booker Prize in 1983 and 1999, the first writer to win it twice, and attended neither dinner
- •Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003
- •Disgrace was attacked by the African National Congress as a racist portrayal of post-apartheid South Africa
- •He emigrated to Australia in 2002 and became an Australian citizen in 2006, living in Adelaide
- •Boyhood, Youth and Summertime form the Scenes from Provincial Life sequence, all written in the third person
- •The Lives of Animals began as his Tanner Lectures at Princeton in 1997
- •His recent fiction includes the Jesus trilogy and The Pole (2023)
Drill it — 9 cards
1 / 9new card
Sources
- The Nobel Prize — J. M. Coetzee: Facts
- The Booker Prizes — Disgrace