JM Coetzee

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guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 July 2008 15.39 BST

1940-

"I am not a herald of community or anything else. I am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light."

Birthplace

Cape Town, South Africa

Education

University of Texas, US

Other jobs

Academic (post-structuralist linguist)

Did you know?

With Disgrace netting the 1999 Booker, Coetzee became the first author to win the prize twice.

Critical verdict

Coetzee manages to transmute political concerns into imaginative landscapes: South Africa becomes a nightmarish out-of-time dystopia, yet retains its social reality. He is critically revered (though some found his memoir, Boyhood, too emotionally disengaged), especially for Life and Times of Michael K, which won the Booker Prize in 1983. 1999's Booker-winning Disgrace, an unflinching look at the new social order, heralded a sparser, simpler style. Elizabeth Costello considers literary celebrity and purpose through the prism of a female fiction writer's consciousness; some critics considered it to be closer to philosophy than a novel, and perhaps even a farewell to fiction. In 2003 he won the Nobel prize for literature.

Recommended works

Life and Times of Michael K is classic, no-word-wasted Coetzee; In the Heart of the Country reads like a female Beckett monologue (that's a compliment).

Influences

Kafka is a strong influence; Coetzee has revisited authors of the past, rewriting Robinson Crusoe as Foe from the female castaway's point of view and reimagining Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg.

Now read on

The novels of André Brink have a similar genesis and concerns to Coetzee: try Rumours of Rain. Damon Galgut is hailed as an important new South African voice.

Adaptations

In the Heart of the Country was filmed as Dust in 1985.

Recommended biography

Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life is his memoir of childhood, combining domestic detail with the personal realisation that something was rotten in the fabric of Afrikaans society. In Youth, the self-conscious would-be artist flees South Africa for a grey, unwelcoming London.