Author
J. M. Coetzee
Birth Date
February 9, 1940
(86 Years)
Associated Country
South Africa
J. M. Coetzee is a Nobel Prize–winning novelist, essayist, and academic widely regarded as one of the most important writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He was born in Cape Town and studied mathematics and literature before pursuing a career in academia and writing.
Coetzee gained international acclaim for novels such as Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life & Times of Michael K (1983), and Disgrace (1999), the latter of which won the Booker Prize. He is one of the few authors to have won the Booker Prize twice, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003 for his profound and rigorously crafted body of work.
His writing is known for its spare, precise style and its deep engagement with themes of power, ethics, colonialism, and human suffering. Later in his life, Coetzee moved to Australia, where he continues to write and contribute to literary and intellectual life.
Coetzee gained international acclaim for novels such as Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life & Times of Michael K (1983), and Disgrace (1999), the latter of which won the Booker Prize. He is one of the few authors to have won the Booker Prize twice, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003 for his profound and rigorously crafted body of work.
His writing is known for its spare, precise style and its deep engagement with themes of power, ethics, colonialism, and human suffering. Later in his life, Coetzee moved to Australia, where he continues to write and contribute to literary and intellectual life.
Books
The Pole 2024
Exacting yet unpredictable, pithy yet complex, Coetzee’s The Pole tells the story of Wittold Walccyzkiecz, a vigorous, extravagantly white-haired pianist and interpreter of Chopin who becomes...
The Death of Jesus 2021
Jesus, Book 3
In Estrella, David has grown to be a tall ten-year-old who is a natural at soccer, and loves kicking a ball around with his friends. His father Simón and Bolívar the dog usually watch while his mother...
Jesus, Book 2
Davíd is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simón and Inés take care of him in their new town, Estrella. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog...
Jesus, Book 1
Separated from his mother as a passenger on a boat bound for a new land, David is a boy who is quite literally adrift. The piece of paper explaining his situation is lost, but a fellow passenger,...
Summertime 2010
Scenes From Provincial Life, Book 3
Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee's new book follows a young biographer as he works on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. The biographer embarks on a series of interviews with people...
Diary of a Bad Year 2008
In Diary of a Bad Year, an aging writer—referred to only as Señor C—is commissioned to produce a series of essays on the state of the modern world. As he reflects on politics, morality, and the...
Slow Man 2006
When photographer Paul Rayment loses his leg in a bicycle accident, he is forced to reexamine how he has lived his life. Through Paul's story, Coetzee addresses questions that define us all: What does...
Elizabeth Costello 2004
Told through an ingenious series of formal addresses, Elizabeth Costello is, on the surface, the story of a woman's life as mother, sister, lover, and writer. Yet it is also a profound and haunting...
Youth 2003
Scenes From Provincial Life, Book 2
The second installment of J. M. Coetzee's fictionalized "memoir" explores a young man's struggle to experience life to its full intensity and transform it into art. The narrator of Youth has long been...
Disgrace 2000
At fifty-two, Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire, but lacking in passion. When an affair with a student leaves him jobless, shunned by friends, and ridiculed by his ex-wife, he...
Boyhood 1998
Scenes From Provincial Life, Book 1
Coetzee grew up in a new development north of Cape Town, tormented by guilt and fear. With a father he despised, and a mother he both adored and resented, he led a double life—the brilliant and...
In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by...
Foe 1988
In 1720 the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe is approached by Susan Barton, lately a castaway on a desert island. She wants him to tell her story, and that of the enigmatic man who has become her...
In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving...
Dusklands 1985
A shattering pair of novellas in the tradition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Dusklands probes the links between the powerful and the powerless. "Vietnam Project" is narrated by a researcher...
For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts...