John Michael Coetzee

 John Michael Coetzee

African Writing in English

South African writer and scholar, who is best known for his novels Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and The Life and Times of Michael K (1983), which won the Booker Prize, Britain's highest literary award. Coetzee's novels often use allegory to question the apartheid regime that governed South Africa until 1990, or racial conflict of any kind, and to explore the resulting effects on individuals and society. Coetzee won a second Booker Prize in 1999 for Disgrace, a novel about life in post-apartheid South Africa.he completed work on two novellas he had already begun, which were published in one volume as Dusklands in 1974. Both novellas, The Vietnam Project and The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee, deal with the dilemmas faced by individuals who are in conflict with society. Dusklands was followed by In the Heart of the Country (1977; published the same year in the United States as From the Heart of the Country, which is structured as the diary of a woman declining into insanity. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), the story of a government magistrate's personal evolution into questioning the government for which he works, won South Africa's highest literary honor, the Central News Agency (CNA) Literary Award, in 1980, as did The Life and Times of Michael K (1983), the story of man's physical and psychological journey through a country at war.Coetzee's other works include Foe (1986), Age of Iron (1990), and The Master of Saint Petersburg (1994), as well as a number of books of essays, among them Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1994). Coetzee has also translated the works of other authors into Dutch, German, French, and Afrikaans.