Where to start with J.M. Coetzee: a guide to his best fiction
Having won the Booker Prize twice, and been nominated six times, J.M. Coetzee is considered one of the greatest living writers in English. But which of his books should you read first?
J.M. Coetzee
J.M. Coetzee is a multi-award-winning author, and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature
He was born in Cape Town, South Africa and became an Australian citizen in 2006. His works of fiction include Dusklands; Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honour, the Central News Agency Literary Award; and Life & Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life, and several essay collections. In 1999, he again won the Booker Prize for Disgrace.
- Born
The ultimate prize to win in the English speaking world
— J.M. Coetzee, winning for the second time in 1999
Winner The Booker Prize 1999
- By
- J.M. Coetzee
- Published by
- Secker & Warburg
J.M. Coetzee became the first author to win the Booker twice with this tale set in post-apartheid South Africa, where a professor’s complacency contributes to his utter downfall.
Other nominated books
In his first Booker Prize-winning novel, J.M. Coetzee sets his main character on an arduous physical journey, which becomes a quest for inner freedom.
Despite her fame, a celebrated author continues the struggle to articulate her vision, in J.M. Coetzee’s exploration of the creative mind.
A calamitous accident irrevocably changes one man’s life, in J.M. Coetzee’s unflinching portrayal of suffering and tenderness.
Sometimes heart-breaking, often funny, Summertime completes J.M.Coetzee’s majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir, begun with Boyhood and Youth.
In this mesmerising allegorical tale, J.M. Coetzee deftly grapples with the big questions of growing up, and what it means to be a ‘parent’.
