41 Facts About JM Coetzee

John Maxwell JM Coetzee OMG was born on 9 February 1940 and is a South African–Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.

JM Coetzee is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language.

JM Coetzee has won the Booker Prize, the CNA Prize, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina etranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates.

JM Coetzee moved to Australia in 2002 and became an Australian citizen in 2006.

JM Coetzee was born in Cape Town, Cape Province, Union of South Africa, on 9 February 1940 to Afrikaner parents.

Related searches

JM Coetzee's father, Zacharias Coetzee, was an occasional attorney and government employee, and his mother, Vera Coetzee, a schoolteacher.

JM Coetzee 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.

JM Coetzee spent most of his early life in Cape Town and in Worcester, a town in the Cape Province, as recounted in his fictionalised memoir, Boyhood .

JM Coetzee's family moved to Worcester when he was eight, after his father lost his government job.

JM Coetzee attended St Joseph's College, a Catholic school in the Cape Town suburb Rondebosch, later studying mathematics and English at the University of Cape Town and receiving his Bachelor of Arts with honours in English in 1960 and his Bachelor of Arts with honours in mathematics in 1961.

JM Coetzee moved to the United Kingdom in 1962 and worked as a computer programmer for IBM in London and ICT in Bracknell, staying until 1965.

In 1965 JM Coetzee went to the University of Texas at Austin, in the United States, on the Fulbright Program, receiving his doctorate in 1969.

JM Coetzee's PhD dissertation was a computer-aided stylistic analysis of Samuel Beckett's English prose.

In 1968, JM Coetzee began teaching English literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he stayed until 1971.

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 1972 JM Coetzee returned to South Africa and was appointed lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town.

JM Coetzee was promoted to senior lecturer and associate professor before becoming Professor of General Literature in 1984.

In 1994 JM Coetzee became Arderne Professor in English, and in 1999 he was appointed Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities.

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

JM Coetzee has received numerous awards throughout his career, although he has a reputation for avoiding award ceremonies.

JM Coetzee was longlisted in 2003 for Elizabeth Costello and in 2005 for Slow Man.

On 2 October 2003, Horace Engdahl, head of the Swedish Academy, announced that JM Coetzee had been chosen as that year's recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the fourth African writer to be so honoured and the second South African, after Nadine Gordimer.

JM Coetzee is a three-time winner of South Africa's CNA Prize.

JM Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians received both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial 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.

JM Coetzee has won the French Prix Femina etranger and two Commonwealth Writers' Prizes for the African region, for Master of St Petersburg in 1995 and for Disgrace in 2000, and the 1987 Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.

Related searches

JM Coetzee holds honorary doctorates from The American University of Paris, 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, the University of Technology, Sydney, the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and the Universidad Iberoamericana.

In 2010, JM Coetzee was made an international ambassador for Adelaide Writers' Week, along with American novelist Susanna Moore and English poet Michael Hulse.

JM Coetzee's work provides particular inspiration to encourage engagement with social and political issues, as well as music.

JM Coetzee first visited Adelaide in 1996 when he was invited to appear at Adelaide Writers' Week.

JM Coetzee has never specified any political orientation, though has alluded to politics in his work.

In February 2016, JM Coetzee was one of 61 signatories to a letter to Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and immigration minister Peter Dutton condemning their government's policy of offshore detention of asylum seekers.

In recent years, JM Coetzee has become a vocal critic of cruelty to animals and an advocate of animal rights.

JM Coetzee's fiction has similarly engaged with animal cruelty and animal welfare, especially The Lives of Animals, Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, and The Old Woman and the Cats.

In 2008, at the behest of John Banville, who alerted him to the matter, JM Coetzee wrote to The Irish Times of his opposition to Trinity College Dublin's use of vivisection on animals for scientific research.

JM Coetzee wanted to be a candidate in the 2014 European Parliament election for the Dutch Party for the Animals, but the Dutch election board rejected his candidacy, arguing that candidates had to prove legal residence in the European Union.

From 2015 to 2018, JM Coetzee was a director of a seminar on the Literatures of the South at the Universidad Nacional de San Martin.

JM Coetzee is known to be reclusive, avoiding publicity to such an extent that he did not collect either of his two Booker Prizes in person.

JM Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication.

On 6 March 2006, JM Coetzee became an Australian citizen, and it has been argued that his "acquired 'Australianness' is deliberately adopted and stressed" by Australians.

JM Coetzee's partner, Dorothy Driver, is an academic at the University of Adelaide.

JM Coetzee has written autobiographical novels, short fiction, translations from Dutch and Afrikaans, and numerous essays and works of criticism.