Coetzee, J. M.
Coetzee, J. M. ( John Michael Coetzee ) ( 1940 – ),South African novelist and academic, born in Cape Town, educated at the university there and at the University of Texas, where he received his doctorate. He has held academic posts in both the USA and South Africa and since 1983 has been professor of general literature at the University of Cape Town. His first book, Ducklands ( 1974 ), contains two linked novellas, one concerning the American involvement in Vietnam, the other about an 18th-cent. Boer settler. In the Heart of the Country ( 1977 ), which was filmed in 1986 as Dust, focuses on the meditations of a disturbed Afrikaner spinster. Waiting for the Barbarians ( 1980 ), a powerful allegory of oppression, was followed by the Booker Prize -winning The Life and Times of Michael K ( 1983 ), in which a man takes his ailing mother back to her home in the country as South Africa is...
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