J. M. Coetzee

South African-Australian novelist and essayist

Date of Birth	:	09 Feb, 1940
Place of Birth	:	Cape Town, South Africa
Profession	:	Novelist, Essayist
Nationality	:	Australian, South African

John Maxwell Coetzee FRSL OMG is a South African and Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language. He has won the Booker Prize (twice), the CNA Literary Award (thrice), the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina étranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates.

Coetzee moved to Australia in 2002 and became an Australian citizen in 2006. He lives in Adelaide, South Australia. He is patron of the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. His most recently published book is The Pole and Other Stories (2023)

Early life and education

Coetzee was born in Cape Town, Cape Province, Union of South Africa, on 9 February 1940 to Afrikaner parents. His father, Zacharias Coetzee (1912–1988), was an occasional attorney and government employee, and his mother, Vera Coetzee (née Wehmeyer; 1904–1986), a schoolteacher. His father was often absent, and enlisted in the army and fought in World War II to avoid being prosecuted on a criminal charge. Vera and her children therefore relied on financial and other support from relatives.The family mainly spoke English at home, but Coetzee spoke Afrikaans with other relatives.

He is descended from 17th-century Dutch immigrants to South Africa, on his father's side, and from Dutch, German, and Polish immigrants through his mother. His mother's grandfather was a Pole, referred to by the Germanised form, Balthazar du Biel, but actually born Balcer Dubiel in 1844 in the village of Czarnylas, in a part of Poland annexed by Prussia. His ancestry caused a lifelong preoccupation with Polish literature and culture, culminating in his 2022 novel The Pole.

Academia

United States

In 1965, Coetzee went to the University of Texas at Austin in the United States and enrolled in bibliography and Old English courses. While there, he taught students at the university, and also wrote a paper on the morphology of the Nama, Malay, and Dutch languages for linguist Archibald A. Hill, who taught at the university. His PhD dissertation was a computer-aided stylistic analysis of Samuel Beckett's English prose. After leaving Texas in 1968, he was awarded his doctorate in 1969.

In 1968, Coetzee began teaching English literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he stayed until 1971. At Buffalo, he began his first novel, Dusklands.

From as early as 1968, Coetzee sought permanent residence in the U.S., a process that was finally unsuccessful, in part due to his involvement in protests against the war in Vietnam. In March 1970, he was one of 45 faculty members who occupied the university's Hayes Hall and were arrested for criminal trespass. The charges against them were dropped in 1971.

University of Cape Town

In 1972, Coetzee returned to South Africa and was appointed lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town. He was promoted to senior lecturer and associate professor before becoming Professor of General Literature in 1984. In 1994 Coetzee became Arderne Professor in English, and in 1999 he was appointed Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities. Upon retirement in 2002, he was awarded emeritus status.

He served on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago until 2003.

Writing career

Coetzee's first novel was Dusklands (1974), and he has published a novel about every three years since. He has also written autobiographical novels, short fiction, translations from Dutch and Afrikaans, and numerous essays and works of criticism. His latest work is The Pole and Other Stories (2023). He has not written a novel set in South Africa since 2009.

According to James Meek, writing in The Guardian in 2009: "Since Disgrace, the nature of Coetzee's project has changed. He has moved away from naturalistic, storytelling fiction towards other forms—essays, polemic and memoir, or a composite of all three in a fictional framework... He seems to be taking less interest in the storytelling keel of his books and is inviting us instead to listen in to an intimate conversation he is having with himself, in the form of multiple alter egos". These alter egos include a character type represented by the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians and David Lurie in Disgrace; another is a female proxy for himself, the "elderly, scholarly, world-weary novelist" Elizabeth Costello, a recurring character in his works; and the last is Coetzee himself, writing autobiographically. Meek also remarks that Coetzee is harsh on himself, in the characters who represent him in some ways.

Family

Coetzee married Philippa Jubber in 1963. They divorced in 1980. They had a son, Nicolas (born 1966), and a daughter, Gisela (born 1968). Nicolas died in 1989 at the age of 23 after accidentally falling from the balcony of his Johannesburg apartment.

Coetzee's younger brother, the journalist David Coetzee, died in 2010.

His partner, Dorothy Driver, is an academic at the University of Adelaide.