John Maxwell Coetzee (born 9 February 1940) is a South African and Australian novelist, essayist, and translator. The recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, Coetzee is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language. He has won the Booker Prize (twice), the Central News Agency Literary Award (thrice), the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina étranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates.
Coetzee moved to Australia in 2002 and became an Australian citizen in 2006. He lives in Adelaide, South Australia. He is patron of the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. His most recently published book is The Pole and Other Stories (2023).
John Maxwell Coetzee was born on 9 February 1940 in Cape Town, in what was then the Union of South Africa. His father, Zacharias Coetzee, was an occasional attorney and government employee, and his mother, Vera Coetzee (née Wehmeyer), was a schoolteacher. His father was often absent, and enlisted in the army and fought in World War II to avoid being prosecuted on a criminal charge. Vera and her children relied on financial and other support from relatives. The family mainly spoke English at home, but Coetzee spoke Afrikaans with other relatives.
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. His mother's grandfather was a Pole, born Balcer Dubiel in 1844 in the village of Czarnylas (Schwarzwald), in a part of Poland annexed by Prussia. Coetzee's ancestry caused a lifelong preoccupation with Polish literature and culture, culminating in his 2022 novel The Pole.
Coetzee spent most of his early life in Cape Town and in Worcester, a town in the Cape Province (modern-day Western Cape), as recounted in his fictionalised 1997 memoir Boyhood. His family moved to Worcester when he was eight, after his father lost his government job. Coetzee attended St. Joseph's College, a Catholic school in the Cape Town suburb Rondebosch. He studied mathematics and English at the University of Cape Town (UCT), receiving a Bachelor of Arts with honours in English in 1960 and a Bachelor of Arts with honours in mathematics in 1961.
Coetzee moved to the United Kingdom in 1962 and worked as a computer programmer for IBM in London and ICT (International Computers and Tabulators) in Bracknell, staying until 1965. His experiences in England are recounted in Youth (2002), his second volume of fictionalised memoirs.
In 1963, the University of Cape Town awarded Coetzee a Master of Arts degree for his thesis The Works of Ford Madox Ford with Particular Reference to the Novels (1963).
In 1965, Coetzee went to the University of Texas at Austin in the United States and enrolled in bibliography and Old English courses. While there, he taught students at the university, and also wrote a paper on the morphology of the Nama, Malay, and Dutch languages for linguist Archibald A. Hill, who taught at the university. His PhD dissertation was a computer-aided stylistic analysis of the English prose of Samuel Beckett. After leaving Texas in 1968, he was awarded his doctorate in 1969.
In 1968, Coetzee began teaching English literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he stayed until 1971. At Buffalo, he began his first novel, Dusklands.
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 March 1970, he was one of 45 faculty members who occupied the university's Hayes Hall and were arrested for criminal trespass. The charges against them were dropped in 1971.
Coetzee was on the faculty of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought until 2003.
In 1972, Coetzee returned to South Africa and was appointed lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town. He was promoted to senior lecturer and associate professor before becoming Professor of General Literature in 1984. In 1994, Coetzee became Arderne Professor in English, and in 1999 he was appointed Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities. Upon retirement in 2002, he was awarded emeritus status.
After relocating to Adelaide, Australia, Coetzee was made an honorary research fellow at the English Department of the University of Adelaide, where his partner, Dorothy Driver, is a fellow academic. As of November 2023, Coetzee is listed as University Professorial Research Fellow within the School of Humanities.
Coetzee's first novel was Dusklands (1974), and he has published a novel about every three years since. He has also written autobiographical novels, short fiction, translations from Dutch and Afrikaans, and numerous essays and works of criticism. His latest work is The Pole and Other Stories (2023). He has not written a novel set in South Africa since 2009.
According to James Meek, writing in The Guardian in 2009: "Since Disgrace, the nature of Coetzee's project has changed. He has moved away from naturalistic, storytelling fiction towards other forms—essays, polemic and memoir, or a composite of all three in a fictional framework... [he] seems to be taking less interest in the storytelling keel of his books and is inviting us instead to listen in to an intimate conversation he is having with himself, in the form of multiple alter egos". These alter egos include a character type represented by the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians and David Lurie in Disgrace; another is a female proxy for himself, the "elderly, scholarly, world-weary novelist" Elizabeth Costello, a recurring character in his works; and the last is Coetzee himself, writing autobiographically. Meek also remarks that Coetzee is harsh on himself, in the characters who represent him in some ways.
Relating to his developing interest in Argentine literature in the 2010s, Coetzee's trilogy of novels The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, and The Death of Jesus reflect his preoccupation with and evolution of his ideas and views on language ("I do not like the way in which English is taking over the world... I don't like the arrogance that this situation breeds in its native speakers. Therefore, I do what little I can to resist the hegemony of the English language"). All three were translated into Spanish, with the last published in Spanish translation first. He also became involved with the Literatures of the South project during this period (2015).
The Pole was first published in Spanish as El polaco, in Argentina, in 2022, and in English the next year.
Awards, recognition, appearances