Summer Reads 2010 - About JM Coetzee
Author Biography
J. M. Coetzee was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice: for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and Disgrace in 1999. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and has received numerous other prizes, among them the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Faber Memorial Award, and the Commonwealth Literary Award. His most recent works are Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and Summertime (2009). Coetzee was born and grew up in Cape Town. He later worked and taught in London, Texas, and New York before returning to lecture at Cape Town University. He now lives in Adelaide.
Selected Quotes:
Both an elegant request that the sum of Coetzee's existence as a public figure be looked for only in his writing, and ample evidence, once again, why that request should be honoured.
Observer
It represents a way of breaking the genre of the memoir by over- and under-fulfilling its demands at the same time.
Michael Sayeau, New Stateman
Clever, tricky, a redefinition of what fiction is.
Grazia, Kate Mosse
Summertime Synopsis
A rich, funny, and deeply affecting autobiographical new novel from one of the world's greatest living writers.
A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972–1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was 'finding his feet as a writer'.
Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him – a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time.
Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth.
Other books by J.M. Coetzee
• Dusklands
• In The Heart of the Country
• Waiting for the Barbarians
• Life and Times of Michael K
• Foe
• Age of Iron
• The Master of Petersburg
• The Lives of Animals
• Disgrace
• Elizabeth Costello
• Slow Man
• Diary of a Bad Year
• Boyhood
• Youth
• Giving Offence: Essays on Censorship
• Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986-1999
• Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005