Quicknation    J.M. Coetzee

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(pronounced "kut-SEE") (born 9 February 1940) is a South African author. On 2 October 2003, it was announced that he was to be the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the fourth African writer to be so honoured, and the second South African (after Nadine Gordimer). The prize was awarded in Stockholm on 10 December 2003.

Coetzee was born in Cape Town, and his formative years were spent between that city and the Western Cape town of Worcester, as recounted in his fictionalised memoir, i (1992). He was schooled at St. Joseph's College, a Catholic school in Rondebosch, Cape Town, and later studied at the University of Cape Town, where he took degrees in mathematics and English.

In the early 1960s he relocated to London, England, where he worked for a time at IBM as a computer programmer; his experiences there were later recounted in i (2002), his second volume of fictionalised memoirs.

Coetzee was later awarded a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States, where he applied computerised stylistic analysis to the works of Samuel Beckett. After leaving Texas he taught English and literature at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) in New York until 1971.

In 1971 he sought permanent residence in the United States, but it was denied due to his involvement in protests against the US military intervention in Vietnam. He then returned to South Africa to a professorship in English Literature at the University of Cape Town. Upon retirement in 2002, he relocated to Adelaide, Australia, where he was made an honorary research fellow at the English department of the University of Adelaide. He served as professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago until 2003.

He was the first author to be awarded the Booker Prize twice: for i in 1999. In addition to his novels, he has published critical works and translations from Dutch and Afrikaans.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, praised for "in innumerable guises [portraying] the involvement of the outsider." The press release for the award cited his "well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue, and analytical brilliance," while focusing on the moral nature of his work.

His partner is fellow University of Cape Town academic Dorothy Driver [1].