J.M. Coetzee Is One Of The Most Important writers in the world today. He is also one of the most distinguished: he was the first writer to win the Booker Prize on two occasions (1983 and 1999),1 and the second South African writer, after Nadine Gordimer, to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (2003). He is the recipient of numerous other literary awards including the Prix Femina Étranger, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.

Although he writes in English and was raised speaking English at home in his native South Africa, Coetzee’s parents were of Afrikaner descent and his family origins date back to the arrival of the first Dutch settlers in South Africa in the seventeenth century. While later to spend significant periods of time abroad in England and the United States, Coetzee spent his early life in Cape Town and the nearby town of Worcester in the Western Cape. After a Catholic schooling with the Marist Brothers in the Cape Town suburb of Rondebosch, he matriculated to the University of Cape Town in 1957, successfully completing honors degrees in English and mathematics in 1960 and 1961. From 1962 to 1965 he worked as a computer programmer in England while undertaking research for a master’s thesis on the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. He was awarded the degree of Master of Arts by the University of Cape Town in 1963. From 1963 to 1980 he was married to Philippa Jubber, a bond that produced two children: Nicolas, born in 1966, and Gisela, born in 1968. Nicolas died in an accident in 1989.

In 1965 Coetzee traveled to the United States, beginning graduate studies in linguistics at the University of Texas with the support of a Fulbright scholarship. His doctorate on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett was completed in 1968. He was appointed an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York in Buffalo in the same year, staying in that post until 1971. During this period his first work of literature, Dusklands, was begun, although not published until 1974.