About the Author

J.M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1940, eight years before the legalized racial segregation instituted by apartheid. He received a Bachelor of Arts with honors in both English and Mathematics from the University of Cape Town in 1960 and 1961. Coetzee went on to earn a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. Interestingly, when he applied for permanent residence in the United States in 1971, he was denied on account of his involvement in protests against Vietnam War. After returning to South Africa, Coetzee served as an English professor at the University of Cape Town until 2002, when he settled in Adelaide, Australia. Coetzee became an official Australian citizen in March of 2006. In 1987, seven years after publishing Waiting for the Barbarians and before the 1994 South African elections that marked the end of South African apartheid, Coetzee was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for composing a body of literature about individual freedom. However, Coetzee takes issue with being celebrated as a herald of personal liberty during a period of political turmoil. “South African literature is… exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from a prison,” Coetzee says, highlighting the physical and psychological violence performed on the spirit and imagination of a nation that is daily presented with “too much truth for art to hold.” All of his novels in some way ask the question of how we get from the world of South Africa’s “violent phantasms” to a world “where a living play of feelings and ideas is possible” is the driving force behind all of his novels. In a1986 article, Coetzee notes that the problems of an enslaved imagination like South Africa’s cannot begin to be resolved until “the choice is no longer limited to either looking on in horrified fascination as the blows fall or turning one’s eyes away.” As a result, Coetzee struggles to find a way to navigate the secrets of the prison cells where the hearts, not unlike the bodies, of South Africans are held captive. Coetzee emphasizes the necessity of finding the alternative ground between looking on and looking away. In a 1990 interview, Coetzee admits “that the concentration on imprisonment, on regimentation, on torture” in Waiting for the Barbarians “was a response to the ban on representing what went on in police cells.” As a novelist, Coetzee tries to find a way to open the darkest cells without being paralyzed, to liberate and provoke imaginations on both sides of the prison bars. This struggle is a theme continued through all of Coetzee’s works, ranging from his fictionalized memoirs in Boyhood and Youth to The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999). Coetzee’s most contemporary novel, Diary of a Bad Year (2007), extends this quest beyond South Africa and into current politics.  Coetzee continues to find it necessary to defy not only censorship, but also legally and socially rationalized forms of violence. His project of exposing the imprisoned South African spirit is akin to what Wallace Stevens called “a violence from within that protects us from a violence from without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.”  In 2003, Coetzee became the fourth African and the second South African to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

--Savannah Stephenson