J. M. Coetzee

John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town and spent much of his childhood there and in the inland town of Worcester, a period he later reworked in Boyhood. He took degrees in English and mathematics at the University of Cape Town, then went to England, where he worked as a computer programmer, before writing a doctoral dissertation on the prose style of Samuel Beckett at the University of Texas at Austin. He taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he began his first novel, Dusklands, and in 1972 returned to South Africa to teach at the University of Cape Town.

Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), set on the frontier of an unnamed empire, made his name; Life & Times of Michael K followed a gardener through a country at war, and in 1983 brought the first of his two Booker Prizes. His fiction is spare and philosophically searching, wary of easy identification, and repeatedly concerned with complicity, the suffering of animals, and the limits of sympathy. Disgrace (1999), about a disgraced professor and his daughter on an Eastern Cape smallholding after apartheid, made him the first writer to win the Booker twice.

Coetzee moved to Adelaide in 2002 and became an Australian citizen in 2006. Since the Nobel Prize he has written increasingly hybrid books, including Elizabeth Costello, the fictionalised memoirs Youth and Summertime, and the Jesus trilogy, and has often chosen to publish first in translation.