Coetzee, J(ohn) M(ichael) (1940– )

South African writer and critic. His work often reflects his opposition to apartheid. His novels include Dusklands (1974), In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Foe (1986), The Master of Petersburg (1994), and Elizabeth Costello (2003). He has won the Booker Prize twice, in 1983 for The Life and Times of Michael K, which is set during a civil war in an unspecified country (obliquely South Africa), and in 1999 for Disgrace, an uncompromising story centring on a violent attack by black men on the white protagonist and his daughter. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

A professor at the University of Cape Town since 1971, Coetzee's nonfiction includes the autobiographies Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life (1997) and Youth: Scenes from a Provincial Life II (2002), as well as the critical works White Writing (1988), Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996), and The Lives of the Animals (1999).