Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the South Africa Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
Twice a Booker winner and a Nobel laureate, he wrote the moral cost of colonisation in prose stripped of everything but what was necessary.
John Maxwell Coetzee grew up in Cape Town and Worcester speaking English at home and Afrikaans outside it, worked as a computer programmer in London, and took a doctorate on Beckett before returning to teach in South Africa.
Waiting for the Barbarians, published in 1980, is set in an unnamed empire on an unnamed frontier and is about what a state does to itself by torturing people it has decided to fear; it was unmistakably about South Africa without once naming it. Life and Times of Michael K won the Booker Prize in 1983. Disgrace won it again in 1999 — the first writer to win twice — and its portrait of a country after the transition was attacked by the ANC as racist, which is part of why it is still argued about.
He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, cited for portraying the surprising involvement of the outsider. The prose is famously austere: no adjective survives that is not load-bearing.
He emigrated to Australia in 2002 and took citizenship there. He is also a longstanding campaigner on animal welfare, which runs through The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello, and he is notoriously reluctant to explain his own work.
Waiting for the Barbarians, published in 1980, is set in an unnamed empire on an unnamed frontier and is about what a state does to itself by torturing people it has decided to fear; it was unmistakably about South Africa without once naming it. Life and Times of Michael K won the Booker Prize in 1983. Disgrace won it again in 1999 — the first writer to win twice — and its portrait of a country after the transition was attacked by the ANC as racist, which is part of why it is still argued about.
He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, cited for portraying the surprising involvement of the outsider. The prose is famously austere: no adjective survives that is not load-bearing.
He emigrated to Australia in 2002 and took citizenship there. He is also a longstanding campaigner on animal welfare, which runs through The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello, and he is notoriously reluctant to explain his own work.
Spotted something wrong? Tell us and we will check it.