AustLit

J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa on 9 February 1940 to Afrikaner parents. He graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1960 and 1961 with degrees in English and mathematics respectively. He moved to London where he worked as a computer programmer from 1962 to 1965. Here, in 1963, he was awarded a Master of Arts for his thesis on the English novelist, Ford Madox Ford. Coetzee received a Fulbright Scholarship in 1965 and pursued a PhD in English, linguistics, and Germanic languages at the University of Texas, where he wrote his dissertation on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett. He took up a teaching position at the State University of New York from 1968 to 1971, but was denied permanent residency in the United States because of his involvement in anti-Vietnam-War protests. It was here that Coetzee began writing fiction in 1969, after abandoning ambitions to become a poet.

Coetzee returned to South Africa in 1972 and primarily lived there between then and 2000, where he taught English Literature at the University of Cape Town and became a Distinguished Professor of Literature in 1999. Between 1984 and 2003, he also had teaching stints at the State University of New York, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago. His first novel, Dusklands, was published in Johannesburg in 1974. He quickly gained recognition in 1977 with his next novel, In the Heart of the Country, winning the South African CNA Literary Award and was published in Britain and the USA. Coetzee was the first writer to win the Booker Prize twice – first for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and again for Disgrace in 1999. Among many other awards, he has won the CNA Literary Award three times, for Life & Times of Michael K, In the Heart of the Country, and Waiting for the Barbarians. Coetzee was also awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society in 1987, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. The South African government presented him with an Order of Mapungubwe (Gold Class) on 27 September 2005 for his “exceptional contribution in the field of literature and for putting South Africa on the world stage” (“National Orders Awards”). Coetzee has been described as “inarguably the most celebrated and decorated living English language author” (Poplak).

In 2002, Coetzee moved to Adelaide as a permanent resident, taking up an honorary research fellow position with the English Department at the University of Adelaide. There is now a J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide, whose head is the writer and academic Brian Castro

Coetzee had first visited the country in 1990 as a guest the University of Queensland, and again in 1996 when he attended Adelaide Writers’ Week. He became an Australian citizen on 6 March 2006, at a special ceremony hosted by then Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone at the Adelaide Writers’ Week. Coetzee’s move was popularly thought to be a rejection of South Africa, after the African National Congress denounced Disgrace as racist for its depiction of a gang rape of a white woman by black men. However, in his speech at the citizenship ceremony, Coetzee said “I didn't so much leave South Africa — a country with which I retain strong emotional ties — as come to Australia." (Debelle). Coetzee continues to live in the Adelaide foothills with his partner, South-African born Dorothy Driver, who is a Professor of English at the University of Adelaide and Emerita Professor at the University of Cape Town.

Since his emigration to Australia, Coetzee “has moved away from naturalistic, storytelling fiction towards other forms - essays, polemic and memoir, or a composite of all three in a fictional framework” (Meek). Despite the blurring of fiction and autobiography in his recent work, Coetzee refuses to clarify these divisions. Despite his notorious reclusiveness, he is also an outspoken advocate for animal rights and for civil liberties. In Sydney on 22 February 2007, Hugo Weaving delivered a speech on Coetzee’s behalf condemning the animal husbandry industry for the animal rights not-for-profit organisation, Voiceless. Aspects of this speech paralleled the one given by his character Elizabeth Costello in Coetzee’s novel of the same name. As well as writing fiction, Coetzee translates Dutch and Afrikaans literature, and is a prolific essayist and literary critic. His significant collections are White Writing (1988), Doubling the Point (1992), Giving Offense (1996), and Stranger Shores (2001). The first official biography of Coetzee was written in Afrikaans by South African academic J.C. Kannemeyer with the full cooperation of the author, and published in 2011 as J M Coetzee : A Life in Writing.