![Life & Times of Michael K](/sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_tiny/public/2021-08/life_and_times_of_michael_k.jpg?itok=1XEj22uW 94w, /sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_small/public/2021-08/life_and_times_of_michael_k.jpg?itok=yXDz1oVK 117w, /sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_medium/public/2021-08/life_and_times_of_michael_k.jpg?itok=b8wYwD3o 151w, /sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_large/public/2021-08/life_and_times_of_michael_k.jpg?itok=4Tmm8UK2 165w, /sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_x_large/public/2021-08/life_and_times_of_michael_k.jpg?itok=kuaAYKmN 208w, /sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_huge/public/2021-08/life_and_times_of_michael_k.jpg?itok=pelXpk4p 273w)
By J.M. Coetzee
Fay Weldon
The first win for one of the prize’s hallowed names, J.M. Coetzee, for The Life and Times of Michael K., and a domestic revelation from the chair of judges that one wouldn’t hear today.
Michael K, with a cleft lip and ‘not right in the head’, has to make a long journey carrying his mother and then her ashes through apartheid-era South Africa during a fictional war. Stages of isolation, malnourishment, mistreatment, and escape must be passed through.
Some critics found in Michael K. a resemblance to Josef K. in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. The chair of judges, Fay Weldon, later admitted disarmingly that she was unused to decision making: ‘My husband makes them all.’
Winner The Booker Prize 1983
By J.M. Coetzee
By John Fuller
By Anita Mason
By Graham Swift