JM Coetzee (9th February
1940-...)
John Michael
Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa. He studied first at Cape Town, and
later earned a Ph.D. degree in literature from the University of Texas at
Austin. He returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of
Cape Town in 1972.
His first novel, actually two novellas, "Dusklands", which examined
the parallels between Americans in Vietnam and the early Dutch settlers in
South Africa, was published in 1974. "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 honour, the Central News Agency (CNA) Literary Award, in 1980.
He won the premier British award, the Booker Prize, for the first time in 1983,
for the "Life and Times of Michael K". In the same year he was
appointed Professor of General Literature at the University of Cape Town.
On October 25th 1999, Coetzee became the first author to win the prestigious
Booker award twice in its 31-year history, for his novel, "Disgrace".
Though Coetzee’s ambitious body of work resists easy characterization, much of
is staged in a pre- and post-apartheid South Africa as it might have been
reimagined by Kafka: a universal setting that says as much about present-day
America as it does about Coetzee’s native land. In 2003 he achieved the
ultimate accolade when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
J M Coetzee lives today in Australia. He has published seven other novels, a
memoir "Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life", and several essay
collections. He has won many other literary prizes include the Lannan Award for
Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize.
The Sunday Times wrote:
"He is an artist of a weight and depth that put him beyond ordinary comparisons."
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Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© José Nicanor Liberos Mascarell
jolimas@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press