John Maxwell Coetzee – South Africa’s mysterious
prize-winning author
As a novelist, linguist and literary critic, one might expect John Maxwell Coetzee to be a man of many words. He is an outspoken opponent of animal cruelty and a leading voice of the animal rights movement. His outstanding works have won Coetzee two Booker prizes, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the Order of Mapungubwe from the South African government. Yet despite the elegance of his prose, Coetzee is a notoriously reclusive man who says little and smiles even less.
Born in Cape Town on 9th February 1940, Afrikaner Coetzee grew up in the shadow of apartheid. After spending his early life in Cape Town, Coetzee’s family moved to Worcester on the Western Cape when his father was fired from his government job for opposing apartheid. Educated at St. Joseph’s College in Rondebosch, Coetzee went on to study both English and Maths at the University of Cape Town, receiving an honours degree for each subject in 1960 and 1961 respectively.
In 1962, shortly after leaving university, Coetzee moved to the UK where he worked as a computer programmer for IBM. While there, he received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Cape Town, before leaving for America to study at the University of Texas in 1965. He received a PhD in linguistics in 1969, and then moved east to teach English at the State University of New York. It was here that he began work on his first novel, Dusklands. After being refused permanent resident status due to his involvement in protests against the Vietnam War, Coetzee returned home to South Africa in 1971, and took up a teaching post at the University of Cape Town where he remained until his retirement in 2002. He then emigrated to Australia, the homeland of his partner, Dorothy River.
Alongside the likes of Breyten Breytenbach, Nadine Gordimer and André Brink, Coetzee was one of the main advocates of the anti-apartheid movement within white Afrikaner literary circles. When presented with the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society in 1987, Coetzee said, “South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less than fully human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison.” More recently, Coetzee spoke out against the anti-terror laws of the US and the UK, comparing them to the apartheid regime. He said that, “I used to think that the people who created laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers ahead of their time.”
However, despite his strong views on freedom and politics as well as his huge volume of critically-lauded work, Coetzee is a man who shies away from the spotlight. Although he has won many literary prizes during his lifetime, Coetzee studiously avoids awards ceremonies, and rarely appears in public. Coetzee is perhaps best summed up by author Rian Malan, who captures the essence of a man who lets his words speak louder than his actions. He said that, “Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.” John Maxwell Coetzee – a man for whom the pen is most certainly mightier than the sword.
