J.M. Coetzee

Born in 1940 in Cape Town to parents of Afrikaner descent, the life of John Maxwell Coetzee (pen name J.M. Coetzee) spans the history of the rise and fall of apartheid -- in which racial segregation is enforced through government policy and legislation -- in South Africa. Whereas for a postcolonial critic this biographical context might immediately invite certain readings of his work, such an approach would be extraordinarily reductive. In fact, many (though by no means all) of the literary texts of which Coetzee’s large oeuvre is comprised make a point of not specifying the racial makeup of their characters, preferring instead to allow the reader to infer them. Such a move exhibits an explicit rejection of South Africa’s racial politics and what has now become its somewhat suffocating history. Interestingly enough, then, Coetzee emigrated to Australia and in 2006 officially became an Australian citizen. After receiving a PhD in linguistics in 1969, Coetzee taught English Literature in institutions in the USA and South Africa, becoming the University of Cape Town's Distinguished Professor of Literature between 1999 and 2001 before he retired in 2002 to Adelaide. Coetzee has a...