J.M. Coetzee

Born on February 9, 1940, in Cape Town, South Africa, John Maxwell Coetzee grew up in an Afrikaner family, his father an occasional attorney and government employee, his mother a schoolteacher. He studied mathematics and English at the University of Cape Town, earning honors degrees in both, then moved to London in 1962 to work as a computer programmer for IBM. He completed a PhD in English at the University of Texas at Austin, writing his dissertation on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett, and spent several years teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo before returning to South Africa in 1971 to join the faculty at the University of Cape Town. His first novel, Dusklands (1974), juxtaposed the Vietnam War with the eighteenth-century Cape frontier. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) became his international breakthrough, a parable of empire and complicity. Life & Times of Michael K (1983) won his first Booker Prize, and Disgrace (1999), set in post-apartheid South Africa, won his second, making him the only author to receive the award twice. His autobiographical fictions Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) examined his own past with the same austere, third-person detachment he brought to all his subjects. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. He emigrated to Australia in 2002, became a citizen in 2006, and lives in Adelaide, where he is patron of the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide.

In 1983 the Booker Prize went to Life & Times of Michael K, and Coetzee did not appear to collect it. Sixteen years later Disgrace won him the prize again, the first time any writer had taken it twice, and again he stayed away. He has kept that same distance from nearly every ceremony since.