South African novelist J. M. Coetzee will read from his works at Hamilton College on Friday, Nov. 2, at 8 p.m. in the Chapel. The reading is free and open to the public. John Michael Coetzee, a novelist, essayist, literary critic, linguist and translator, is one of the most respected writers working in the world today.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, he studied first at Cape Town, and later earned a Ph.D. degree in literature from the University of Texas at Austin. Coetzee returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town in 1972.
His first novel, actually two novellas, Dusklands, which examined the parallels between Americans in Vietnam and the early Dutch settlers in South Africa, was published in 1974. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), the story of a government magistrate's personal evolution into questioning the government for which he works, won South Africa's highest literary honor, the Central News Agency (CNA) Literary Award, in 1980.
Coetzee won the premier British award, the Booker Prize, for the first time in 1983, for The Life and Times of Michael K. The book, set in a South Africa whose civil administration is collapsing under the pressure of years of civil strife, tells of an obscure young gardener named "Michael K.," who 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, but he is determined to live with dignity.
In 1999, Coetzee became the first author to win the prestigious Booker award twice in its 31-year history, for his current novel, Disgrace. Set in post-apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape, Disgrace is a portrait of the new South Africa that is ultimately about grace and love.
Coetzee lives today in South Africa. He has published seven other novels, including a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life, In the Heart of the Country, The Age of Iron, and The Master of Petersburg, as well as several essay collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Prix Etranger Femina. Coetzee's reading is sponsored by the office of the President, and the departments of English and comparative literature.
