John Maxwell Coetzee (English pronunciation: /kʊtˈsiː/) (born 9 February 1940) is an author and academic from South Africa. He is now an Australian citizen and lives in South Australia. A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee has won the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa on 9 February 1940 to Afrikaner parents. His father was an occasional law...
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John Maxwell Coetzee (English pronunciation: /kʊtˈsiː/) (born 9 February 1940) is an author and academic from South Africa. He is now an Australian citizen and lives in South Australia. A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee has won the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa on 9 February 1940 to Afrikaner parents. His father was an occasional lawyer, government employee and sheep farmer, and his mother a schoolteacher. The family spoke English at home, but Coetzee spoke Afrikaans with other relatives. The family were descended from early Dutch settlers dating to the 17th century. Coetzee also has Polish roots, as his great-grandfather Baltazar (or Balcer) Dubiel was a Polish immigrant to South Africa.
Coetzee spent most of his early life in Cape Town and in Worcester in Cape Province (modern-day Western Cape) as recounted in his fictionalized memoir, Boyhood (1997). The family moved...
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