Belmont Rd, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7700, South Africa
Coetzee attended St. Joseph's College, a Catholic school in the Cape Town suburb of Rondebosch.
College/University
Gallery of John Coetzee
Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7700, South Africa
Coetzee studied mathematics and English at the University of Cape Town. He received his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in English in 1960 and his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Mathematics in 1961. He received his Master of Arts in 1963.
Gallery of John Coetzee
Austin, TX 78712, United States
In 1965 Coetzee went to the University of Texas at Austin on the Fulbright Program, receiving his doctorate in 1969. His Doctor of Philosophy thesis was a computer-aided stylistic analysis of Samuel Beckett's English prose.
Career
Gallery of John Coetzee
1963
United Kingdom
John Maxwell Coetzee in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s.
Gallery of John Coetzee
1985
South Africa
Coetzee around 1985.
Gallery of John Coetzee
2003
Södra Blasieholmshamnen 8, 103 27 Stockholm, Sweden
South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee, winner of the 2003 literature Nobel Prize, at the Stockholm Grand Hotel bar.
Gallery of John Coetzee
2003
Milan, Italy
John Maxwell Coetzee in Milan, Italy, in February 2003.
Gallery of John Coetzee
2003
Saronno, Italy
John Maxwell Coetzee in Saronno, Italy in 2003.
Achievements
2002
Hötorget 8, 103 87 Stockholm, Sweden
John Maxwell Coetzee recieving his Nobel Prize.
Membership
Modern Language Association of America
J. M. Coetzee is a member of the International Comparative Literature Association.
Royal Society of Literature
J. M. Coetzee is a member of the Royal Society of Literature.
Royal Society of Literature
J. M. Coetzee is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
International Comparative Literature Association
J. M. Coetzee is a member of the Modern Language Association of America .
Coetzee studied mathematics and English at the University of Cape Town. He received his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in English in 1960 and his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Mathematics in 1961. He received his Master of Arts in 1963.
In 1965 Coetzee went to the University of Texas at Austin on the Fulbright Program, receiving his doctorate in 1969. His Doctor of Philosophy thesis was a computer-aided stylistic analysis of Samuel Beckett's English prose.
(A shattering pair of novellas in the tradition of Conrad'...)
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 investigating the effectiveness of United States propaganda and psychological warfare in Vietnam. The question of power is also explored in "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," the story of an eighteenth-century Boer frontiersman who vows revenge on the Hottentot natives because they have failed to treat him with the respect that he thinks a white man deserves. With striking intensity, J. M. Coetzee penetrates the twilight land of obsession, charting the nature on colonization as it seeks, in 1970 as in 1760, to absorb the wilds into the Western dusklands.
(On a remote farm in South Africa, the protagonist of J. M...)
On a remote farm in South Africa, the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee's fierce and passionate novel watches the life from which she has been excluded. Ignored by her callous father, scorned and feared by his servants, she is a bitterly intelligent woman whose outward meekness disguises a desperate resolve not to become "one of the forgotten ones of history." When her father takes an African mistress, that resolve precipitates an act of vengeance that suggests a chemical reaction between the colonizer and the colonized - and between European yearnings and the vastness and solitude of Africa. With vast assurance and an unerring eye, J. M. Coetzee has turned the family romance into a mirror of the colonial experience.
(For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of th...)
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 arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state. J. M. Coetzee's prize-winning novel is a startling allegory of the war between opressor and opressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency.
(In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to t...)
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 armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life-affirming novel goes to the center of human experience - the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for the purity of vision.
(In 1720 the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe is approach...)
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 rescuer, companion, master and sometimes lover: Cruso. Cruso is dead, and his manservant, Friday, is incapable of speech. As she tries to relate the truth about him, the ambitious Barton cannot help turning Cruso into her invention. For as narrated by Foe - as by Coetzee himself - the stories we thought we knew acquire depths that are at once treacherous, elegant, and unexpectedly moving.
White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa
(Essays discuss the white literature of South Africa, expl...)
Essays discuss the white literature of South Africa, explain how white writings attempt to justify colonization and look at the novels of van den Heever and Millin.
(Mrs. Curren, a retired classics professor dying of cancer...)
Mrs. Curren, a retired classics professor dying of cancer in her native Cape Town, writes an extended letter to her daughter in America. She recounts a series of extraordinary events beginning with the discovery of Mr. Vercueil, a homeless man, sleeping beside her garage. The worsening social upheaval and deadly violence of a morally corrupt political order drives Mrs. Curren to contemplate a final shocking act of protest and outrage. She entrusts Vercueil with her letter and her legacy. But is this homeless man who he seems? And is truth more illuminating, or destructive, than fire?
(In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, latel...)
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 epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavel's life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev, who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepson's ghost - and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy - Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating, compassionate and cruel, pious and unspeakably perverse.
(Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. J. M. Coetz...)
Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. J. M. Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of one who has lived and worked under its shadow. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. He argues that a destructive dynamic of belligerence and escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by censorship. From Osip Mandelstam commanded to compose an ode in praise of Stalin, to Breyten Breytenbach writing poems under and for the eyes of his prison guards, to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn engaging in a trial of wits with the organs of the Soviet state, Giving Offense focuses on the ways authors have historically responded to censorship. It also analyzes the arguments of Catharine MacKinnon for the suppression of pornography and traces the operations of the old South African censorship system.
Boyhood: Scenes from provincial life eBook: J.M. Coetzee: Kindle Store
(In Boyhood, J. M. Coetzee revisits the South Africa of ha...)
In Boyhood, J. M. Coetzee revisits the South Africa of half a century ago, to write about his childhood and interior life. Boyhood's young narrator grew up in a small country town. With a father he imitated but could not respect, and a mother he both adored and resented, he picked his way through a world that refused to explain its rules, but whose rules he knew he must obey. Steering between these contradictions, Boyhood evokes the tensions, delights and terrors of childhood with startling, haunting immediacy. Coetzee examines his young self with the dispassionate curiosity of an explorer rediscovering his own early footprints, and the account of his progress is bright, hard and simply compelling.
(Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coet...)
Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coetzee the winner of two Booker Prizes, Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression.
(n this landmark book, Nobel Prize-winning writer J. M. Co...)
n this landmark book, Nobel Prize-winning writer J. M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello’s own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. Literature, philosophy, performance, and deep human conviction - Coetzee brings all these elements into play.
(Two-time Booker Prize-winner J. M. Coetzee is one of the ...)
Two-time Booker Prize-winner J. M. Coetzee is one of the world's greatest novelists. This thought-provoking collection gathers twenty-six of his essays on books and writing. In his opening piece, "What Is a Classic?", Coetzee asks, "What does it mean in living terms to say that the classic is what survives?" He explores the answer by way of T. S. Eliot, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Zbigniew Herbert. Coetzee goes on to discuss eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors such as Defoe and Turgenev, the German modernists such as Rilke, Kafka, and Musil, and the giants of late-twentieth-century literature, among them Brodsky, Gordimer, Rushdie, and Lessing.
(The second installment of J. M. Coetzee's fictionalized "...)
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 plotting an escape from the stifling love of his overbearing mother, a father whose failures haunt him, and what he is sure is an impending revolution in his native country of South Africa. Arriving at last in London in the 1960s, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance and instead begins a dark pilgrimage into adulthood. Youth is a remarkable portrait of a consciousness, isolated and adrift, turning in on itself, of a young man struggling to find his way in the world, written with tenderness and a fierce clarity.
(Since 1982, J. M. Coetzee has been dazzling the literary ...)
Since 1982, J. M. Coetzee has been dazzling the literary world. After eight novels that have won, among other awards, two Booker Prizes, and most recently, the Nobel Prize, Coetzee has once again crafted an unusual and deeply affecting tale. 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 meditation on the nature of storytelling.
(J. M. Coetzee, one of the greatest living writers in the ...)
J. M. Coetzee, one of the greatest living writers in the English language, has crafted a deeply moving tale of love and mortality in his new book, Slow Man. 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 it mean to do good? What in our lives is ultimately meaningful? How do we define the place we call "home"? In his clear and uncompromising voice, Coetzee struggles with these issues and offers a story that will dazzle the reader on every page.
(An eminent, aging Australian writer is invited to contrib...)
An eminent, aging Australian writer is invited to contribute to a book entitled Strong Opinions. For him, troubled by Australia's complicity in the wars in the Middle East, it is a chance to air some urgent concerns: how should a citizen of a modern democracy react to their state's involvement in an immoral war on terror, a war that involves the use of torture? Then in the laundry room of his apartment block, he encounters an alluring young woman. He offers her work typing up his manuscript. Anya is not interested in politics, but the job will be a welcome distraction, as will the writer's evident attraction towards her. Her boyfriend, Alan, is an investment consultant who understands the world in harsh economic terms. Suspicious of his trophy girlfriend's new pastime, Alan begins to formulate a plan...
(In addition to being one of the most acclaimed and accomp...)
In addition to being one of the most acclaimed and accomplished fiction writers in the world, Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee is also a literary critic of the highest caliber. In this collection of twenty essays, Coetzee examines the work of some of the twentieth-century’s greatest writers - from Samuel Beckett and Günter Grass to Gabriel García Márquez and Philip Roth. Brilliantly insightful, challenging yet accessible, these pieces demonstrate Coetzee’s sharp eye and unwavering critical acumen. Written with great clarity and precision, they offer a window into twenty immortal texts that will be of major interest to all readers of international literature, as well as to Coetzee’s many fans.
(Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee's new book follo...)
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 who were important to Coetzee during the period when he was "finding his feet as a writer"-in his thirties and sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. Their testimonies create an image of an awkward, reserved, and bookish young man who finds it difficult to connect with the people around him. An innovative and inspired work of fiction-incisive, elegant, and often surprisingly funny- Summertime allows one of the most revered writers of our time to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye.
Scenes from Provincial Life: Boyhood, Youth, Summertime
(Few writers have won as much critical acclaim and as many...)
Few writers have won as much critical acclaim and as many admirers in the literary world as J. M. Coetzee. Yet the celebrated author rarely spoke of himself until the 1997 arrival of Boyhood, a masterly and evocative tale of a young writer's beginnings. Continuing with the fiercely tender Youth and the innovative Summertime, Scenes from Provincial Life is a heartbreaking and often very funny portrait of the artist by one of the world's greatest writers.
(An astonishing new masterpiece from the Nobel and twice B...)
An astonishing new masterpiece from the Nobel and twice Booker Prize-winning author of Disgrace and Summertime After crossing oceans, a man and a boy - both strangers to each other - arrive in a new land. David, the boy, has lost his mother and Simón vows to look after him. In this strange new country they are assigned a new name, a new birthday, a new life. Knowing nothing of their surroundings, nor the language or customs, they are determined to find David’s mother. Though the boy has no memory of her, Simón is certain he will recognize her at first sight. “But after we find her,” David asks, “what are we here for?” The Childhood of Jesus is a profound, beautiful and continually surprising novel from a very great writer.
(Nobel laureate and two-time Booker Prize winner J. M. Coe...)
Nobel laureate and two-time Booker Prize winner J. M. Coetzee returns with a haunting and surprising novel about childhood and destiny that is sure to rank with his classic novels. 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, Simón, vows to look after the boy. When the boat docks, David and Simón are issued new names, new birthdays, and virtually a whole new life. Strangers in a strange land, knowing nothing of their surroundings, nor the language or customs, they are determined to find David’s mother. Though the boy has no memory of her, Simón is certain he will recognize her at first sight. “But after we find her,” David asks, “what are we here for?” An eerie allegorical tale told largely through dialogue, The Childhood of Jesus is a literary feat - a novel of ideas that is also a tender, compelling narrative. Coetzee’s many fans will celebrate his return while new readers will find The Childhood of Jesus an intriguing introduction to the work of a true master.
The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy
(J.M. Coetzee: What relationship do I have with my life hi...)
J.M. Coetzee: What relationship do I have with my life history? Am I its conscious author, or should I think of myself as simply a voice uttering with as little interference as possible a stream of words welling up from my interior? Arabella Kurtz: One way of thinking about psychoanalysis is to say that it is aimed at setting free the narrative or autobiographical imagination. The Good Story is a fascinating dialogue about psychotherapy and the art of storytelling between a writer with a long-standing interest in moral psychology and a psychotherapist with training in literary studies. Coetzee and Kurtz consider psychotherapy and its wider social context from different perspectives, but at the heart of both of their approaches is a concern with narrative. Working alone, the writer is in control of the story he or she tells. The therapist, on the other hand, collaborates with the patient in developing an account of the patient's life and identity that is both meaningful and true. In a meeting of minds that is illuminating and thought-provoking, the authors discuss both individual psychology and the psychology of the group: the school classroom, gangs and the settler nation, in which the brutal deeds of ancestors are accommodated into a national story. Drawing on great writers like Cervantes and Dostoevsky and psychoanalysts like Freud and Melanie Klein, Coetzee and Kurtz explore the human capacity for self-examination, our wish to tell our own life stories and the resistances we encounter along the way.
(The Death of Jesus is forthcoming from Viking. “When you ...)
The Death of Jesus is forthcoming from Viking. “When you travel across the ocean on a boat, all your memories are washed away and you start a completely new life. That is how it is. There is no before. There is no history. The boat docks at the harbour and we climb down the gangplank and we are plunged into the here and now. Time begins.” Davíd is a 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 Bolívar to watch over him. But he’ll be seven soon and he should be at school. And so, with the guidance of the three sisters who own the farm where Simón and Inés work, Davíd is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It’s here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky. But it’s here, too, that he will make troubling discoveries about what grown-ups are capable of. In this mesmerizing allegorical tale, Coetzee deftly grapples with the big questions of growing up, of what it means to be a “parent,” the constant battle between intellect and emotion, and how we choose to live our lives.
(J. M. Coetzee’s latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is...)
J. M. Coetzee’s latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. J. M. Coetzee is not only one of the most acclaimed fiction writers in the world, he is also an accomplished and insightful literary critic. In Late Essays: 2006–2016, a thought-provoking collection of twenty-three pieces, he examines the work of some of the world’s greatest writers, from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Goethe and Irène Némirovsky to Coetzee’s contemporary Philip Roth. Challenging yet accessible, literary master Coetzee writes these essays with great clarity and precision, offering readers an illuminating and wise analysis of a remarkable list of works of international literature that span three centuries.
(After The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus,...)
After The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, the Nobel prize-winning author completes his haunting trilogy with a new masterwork, The Death of Jesus 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 Inés now works in a fashion boutique. David still asks many questions, challenging his parents, and any authority figure in his life. In dancing class at the Academy of Music, he dances as he chooses. He refuses to do sums and will not read any books except Don Quixote. One day Julio Fabricante, the director of a nearby orphanage, invites David and his friends to form a proper soccer team. David decides he will leave Simón and Inés to live with Julio, but before long he succumbs to a mysterious illness. In The Death of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee continues to explore the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions.
John Maxwell Coetzee is a South African and Australian writer and educator. He is the recipient of the Nobel prize in literature in 2003.
Background
Ethnicity:
Coetzee is descended from early Dutch immigrants to South Africa in the 17th century on his father's side, while his mother was a descendant of Dutch, German and Polish immigrants.
John Maxwell Coetzee was born on February 9, 1940, in Cape Town, Republic of South Africa as the elder of two children to the family of Zacharias Coetzee and Vera Wehmeyer. His mother was a primary school teacher. His father was trained as an attorney, but practiced as such only intermittently; during the years 1941-45, he served with the South African forces in North Africa and Italy. Though Coetzee’s parents were not of British descent, the language spoken at home was English though with relatives used Afrikaans with other relatives.
Education
Coetzee received his primary schooling in Cape Town and in the nearby town of Worcester. For his secondary education, he attended a school in Cape Town run by a Catholic order, the Marist Brothers. He matriculated in 1956. Coetzee entered the University of Cape Town in 1957 where he studied mathematics and English. He received his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in English in 1960 and his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Mathematics in 1961. He received his Master of Arts in 1963.
In 1965 Coetzee went to the University of Texas at Austin on the Fulbright Program, receiving his doctorate in 1969. His Doctor of Philosophy thesis was a computer-aided stylistic analysis of Samuel Beckett's English prose.
Coetzee spent the years 1962-65 in England, working as a computer programmer while doing research for a thesis on the English novelist Ford Madox Ford.
In 1968-1971 Coetzee was an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York in Buffalo. After an application for permanent residence in the United States was denied, he returned to South Africa. From 1972 until 2002 he held a series of positions at the University of Cape Town, the last of them as Distinguished Professor of Literature.
Between 1984 and 2003 Coetzee also taught frequently in the United States: at the State University of New York, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago, where for six years he was a member of the Committee on Social Thought.
Coetzee began writing fiction in 1969. His first book, Dusklands, was published in South Africa in 1974. In the Heart of the Country (1977) won South Africa’s then principal literary award, the CNA Prize, and was published in Britain and the United States. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) received international notice. His reputation was confirmed by Life & Times of Michael K (1983), which won Britain’s Booker Prize. It was followed by Foe (1986), Age of Iron (1990), The Master of Petersburg (1994), and Disgrace (1999), which again won the Booker Prize.
Coetzee also wrote two fictionalized memoirs, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). The Lives of Animals (1999) is a fictionalized lecture, later absorbed into Elizabeth Costello (2003). White Writing (1988) is a set of essays on South African literature and culture. Doubling the Point (1992) consists of essays and interviews with David Attwell. Giving Offense (1996) is a study of literary censorship. Stranger Shores (2001) collects his later literary essays.
Coetzee has also been active as a translator of Dutch and Afrikaans literature.
In 2002 Coetzee emigrated to Australia. He lives with his partner Dorothy Driver in Adelaide, South Australia, where he holds an honorary position at the University of Adelaide.
Coetzee has been the recipient of numerous awards throughout his career, although he has a reputation for avoiding award ceremonies. He received 1983 and 1999 Booker Prizes and most notably the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He also received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and Prix Femina Étranger. Coetzee was named Knight of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He was awarded the South African Gold Order of Mapungubwe.
Coetzee’s Protestantism is a matter of lineage and culture: He’s a descendant of the Dutch Reformed settlers in South Africa who became the Afrikaners. But it is also, he makes clear in his memoirs, a matter of personality and sensibility.
Politics
Coetzee has never specified any political orientation, though has alluded to politics in his work. He is sympathetic to the human concerns of the left.
Views
Coetzee's novels are characterized by their well-crafted composition and analytical brilliance, containing stories that often criticize the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilization. As a politically engaged author, Coetzee's style has been compared with that of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. The painful and offensive reality of South African apartheid and the conflicts embodied in it appear again and again in Coetzee’s work. He is on record as having said that apartheid values and behavior could arise anywhere.
Quotations:
"There is no longer a left worth speaking of, and a language of the left. The language of politics, with its new economistic bent, is even more repellent than it was fifteen years ago."
Membership
J. M. Coetzee is a member of the Modern Language Association of America, the International Comparative Literature Association, the Royal Society of Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Modern Language Association of America
,
United States
Royal Society of Literature
,
United Kingdom
Royal Society of Literature
,
United States
International Comparative Literature Association
Personality
Coetzee is known to be reclusive and avoids publicity to such an extent that he did not collect either of his two Booker Prizes in person. As a result of his reclusive nature, signed copies of Coetzee's fiction are highly sought after. Recognising this, he was a key figure in the establishment of Oak Tree Press's First Chapter Series, limited edition signed works by literary greats to raise money for the child victims and orphans of the African HIV/AIDS crisis.
Quotes from others about the person
"Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke, or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word." - South African writer Rian Malan
Interests
mathematics, history
Politicians
Nelson Mandela
Writers
William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Daniel Defoe, Robert Walser, Ford Madox Ford, Zbigniew Herbert, Samuel Richardson, Vladimir Nabokov
Artists
Berlinde De Bruyckere
Sport & Clubs
cycling
Music & Bands
Johann Sebastian Bach
Connections
Coetzee married South African Phillipa Jubber in 1963 and was divorced in the 1980s. He had two children, a daughter Gisela, born in 1968, and a son, Nicholas, who died in an accident when 23. Coetzee now lives permanently in Adelaide, Australia with his life partner Dorothy Driver.
