John M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940. He studied first at Cape Town, and later earned a Ph.D. degree in literature from the University of Texas at Austin. He returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town in 1972.

His first novel, actually two novellas, Dusklands , which examined the parallels between Americans in Vietnam and the early Dutch settlers in South Africa, was published in 1974. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), the story of a government magistrate's personal evolution into questioning the government for which he works, won South Africa's highest literary honor, the Central News Agency (CNA) Literary Award in 1980. He won the premier British award, the Booker Prize, for the first time in 1983, for the Life and Times of Michael K . In the same year he was appointed Professor of General Literature at the University of Cape Town, which post he still holds.

On October 25th 1999, Coetzee became the first author to win the prestigious Booker award twice in its 31-year history, for his current novel, Disgrace and the Life and Times of Michael K (1983).

Today, J.M. Coetzee lives in South Africa. He has published several other novels, the memoirs Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life and Youth:Scenes from a Provincial Life II , and several essay collections. He has won many other literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize.

< more on the author, his work, and literary criticisms can be found at Literature Resource Center >