| 1 | Name: | Dr. J. M. Coetzee | |
| Year Elected: | 2006 | ||
| Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
| Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1940 | ||
J.M. Coetzee is one of the great novelists now writing in English. Impregnated with an austere moral vision, his novels have explored human dilemmas in settings ranging from imagined antiquity (Waiting for the Barbarians) to his native South Africa in the aftermath of apartheid. His novel The Master of Petersburg is a novelistic recreation of Dostoyevsky's sojourn in St. Petersburg when he went searching for traces of his stepson. His most recent book, Summertime (2009), continues his fictional autobiography from his earlier works, Boyhood and Youth. Dr. Coetzee is also a distinguished critic and essayist with an astonishing command of world literature, as evidenced in Stranger Shores, his collection of essays that appeared in 2002. Much of his critical work has also appeared in The New York Review of Books. Currently residing in Australia, Dr. Coetzee earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin in 1969; has taught at the State University of New York, Buffalo (1968-71) and the University of Cape Town (1972-2000); and was a member of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. His many honors include the Booker Prize (1983, 1999) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (2003). His latest works include the collection Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 (2007), the novel Diary of a Bad Year (2007), Here and Now: Letters 2008-2011 (2013), The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (with A. Kurtz, 2015), The Childhood of Jesus (2013), and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016). | |||