One of the most important novelists of our time, J.M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9th, 1940.
After studying English and Mathematics in his hometown, he moved to England in 1962, where he lived and worked for three years as a computer programmer, while preparing a thesis on the novelist Ford Madox Ford.
In 1968, Coetzee earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Texas, Austin, with a dissertation on computer stylistic analysis of the work of Samuel Beckett.
His literary career in fiction began in 1969, with the book Dusklands, published in 1974, in South Africa. He gained worldwide recognition with works such as In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life and Times of Michael K (1983), a Booker Prize-winning novel, Foe (1986), Age of Iron (1990), Master of Petersburg (1994) and Disgrace (1999), which won him a second Booker Prize, making Coetzee the first author to be awarded the prize twice.
He continues a solid career in the world of literary fiction with Elizabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005), Diary of a Bad Year (2007), The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) and The Death of Jesus (2019). He also stood out in autobiographical fiction, with the works Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997), Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002) and Summertime (2009), throughout which he explores a doubly factual and fictional universe, based on his own experiences.
His oeuvre also has numerous translations and critical essays.
In 2003, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Currently, J.M. Coetzee lives in Australia, where he is on the honorary research body of the University of Adelaide, in the Department of English Studies.