J. M. Coetzee (edit name/settings)

John Maxwell Coetzee (born 9 February 1940) is an author and academic from South Africa. He is now an Australian citizen and lives in Adelaide, South Australia. A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee has won the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.<br /><br />Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa on 9 February 1940 to parents of Afrikaner descent.<br /><br /><b>Academic and literary career<br /></b>Coetzee relocated to the United Kingdom in 1962, where he worked as a computer programmer, staying until 1965. He initially worked for IBM in London before moving to International Computers Limited in Bracknell, Berkshire. In 1963, while working in the UK, he was awarded a Master of Arts degree from the University of Cape Town for a dissertation on the novels of Ford Madox Ford. His experiences in England were later recounted in Youth (2002), his second volume of fictionalized memoirs.<br /><br />Coetzee went to the University of Texas at Austin on the Fulbright Program in 1965. He received a PhD in linguistics there in 1969. His PhD thesis was on computer stylistic analysis of the works of Samuel Beckett. In 1968, he began teaching English and literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo where he stayed until 1971. It was at Buffalo that he started his first novel, Dusklands. He then returned to South Africa to teach English literature at the University of Cape Town. He was promoted to Professor of General Literature in 1983 and was Distinguished Professor of Literature between 1999 and 2001. Upon retiring in 2002, Coetzee relocated to Adelaide, Australia, where he was made an honorary research fellow at the English Department of the University of Adelaide, where his partner, Dorothy Driver, is a fellow academic. He served as professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago until 2003. In addition to his novels, he has published critical works and translations from Dutch and Afrikaans.<br /><br />On 6 March 2006, Coetzee became an Australian citizen.<br /><br /><b>Achievements and awards</b><br />Coetzee has gained many awards throughout his career. His novel Waiting for the Barbarians was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and he is three-times winner of the CNA Prize. Age of Iron was awarded the Sunday Express Book of the Year award, and The Master of Petersburg was awarded the Irish Times International Fiction Prize in 1995. He has also won the French Prix Femina Étranger, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and the 1987 Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.<br /><br />He was the first author to be awarded the Booker Prize twice: first for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and again for Disgrace in 1999. Coetzee was named on the longlist for the 2009 prize for Summertime and was an early favourite to win. Coetzee subsequently made the shortlist, but lost out to bookmakers' favourite and eventual winner Hilary Mantel. Coetzee was also longlisted in 2003 for Elizabeth Costello and in 2005 for Slow Man.<br /><br />On 2 October 2003 it was announced that he was to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the fourth African writer to be so honoured, and the second South African after Nadine Gordimer. When awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy stated that Coetzee "in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider". The press release for the award also cited his "well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance," while focusing on the moral nature of his work. The prize ceremony was held in Stockholm on 10 December 2003. Coetzee was awarded the Order of Mapungubwe (gold class) by the South African government on 27 September 2005 for his "exceptional contribution in the field of literature and for putting South Africa on the world stage." He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Adelaide, La Trobe University, the University of Natal, the University of Oxford, Rhodes University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Strathclyde and the University of Technology, Sydney.<br /><br /><b>Bibliography</b><br /><b>Fiction</b><br />* Dusklands (1974) ISBN 0-14-024177-9<br /> * In the Heart of the Country (1977) ISBN 0-14-006228-9<br /> * Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) ISBN 0-14-006110-X<br /> * Life & Times of Michael K (1983) ISBN 0-14-007448-1<br /> * Foe (1986) ISBN 0-14-009623-X<br /> * Age of Iron (1990) ISBN 0-14-027565-7<br /> * The Master of Petersburg (1994) ISBN 0-14-023810-7<br /> * The Lives of Animals (1999) ISBN 0-691-07089-X<br /> * Disgrace (1999) ISBN 0-09-928952-0<br /> * Elizabeth Costello (2003) ISBN 0-670-03130-5<br /> * Slow Man (2005) ISBN 0-670-03459-2<br /> * Diary of a Bad Year (2007) ISBN 1-846-55120-X<br /><br /><b>Fictionalised autobiography / autofiction</b><br />* Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) ISBN 0-14-026566-X<br /> * Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002) ISBN 0-670-03102-X<br /> * Summertime (2009) ISBN 1-846-55318-0<br /><br /><b>Non-fiction</b><br />* White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988) ISBN 0-300-03974-3<br /> * Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1992) ISBN 0-674-21518-4<br /> * Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996), University of Chicago Press <hence, US spelling "offense"> ISBN 0-226-11176-8<br /> * Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999 (2002) ISBN 0-142-00137-6<br /> * Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000–2005 (2007) ISBN 0-099-50614-9<br /><br /><b>Translations and introductions</b><br />* A Posthumous Confession by Marcellus Emants (Boston: Twayne, 1976 & London: Quartet, 1986) Translated by J. M. Coetzee.<br /> * The Expedition to the Boabab Tree by Wilma Stockenström (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1983 & London: Faber, 1984) Translated by J. M. Coetzee.<br /> * Landscape with Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands Translated and Introduced by J. M. Coetzee (2004) ISBN 0-691-12385-3<br /> * Introduction to Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (Oxford World's Classics) ISBN 0-192-10033-5<br /> * Introduction to Brighton Rock by Graham Greene (Penguin Classics) ISBN 0-142-43797-2<br /> * Introduction to Dangling Man by Saul Bellow (Penguin Classics) ISBN 0-143-03987-3<br /><br /><b>Book reviews</b><br />* Coetzee, J. M. (30 April 2009). "The Making of Samuel Beckett". The New York Review of Books 56 (7): 13–16. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22612. <br /><br /> Reviews Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (eds) (2009). The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 1: 1929–1940. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521867932. <br /><br /><b>Film and TV adaptations</b><br />* Dust (1985), based on In the Heart of the Country<br /> * The Lives of Animals (2002)<br /> * Disgrace (2008)<br /><br />Source: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._Coetzee" rel="nofollow">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._Coetzee</a><br /><br /><br /><br />