Coetzee was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice
John Maxwell Coetzee, born in Cape Town on 9 February 1940, took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. Before that he had already become the first writer to win the Booker twice—for Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999).
Raised mainly in English in Cape Town and Worcester, with Afrikaans for relatives, Coetzee descends from Dutch settlers on his father's side and Dutch, German, and Polish lines through schoolteacher mother Vera—ancestry that fed a lifelong Polish preoccupation culminating in the 2022 novel The Pole. He earned UCT honours degrees in English (1960) and mathematics (1961), programmed for IBM in London and ICT in Bracknell, then wrote a computer-aided stylistic dissertation on Samuel Beckett's English prose, receiving his Texas doctorate in 1969. Teaching at SUNY Buffalo (1968–1971), he began Dusklands and joined a Hayes Hall occupation against the Vietnam War; U.S. residency bids failed partly over that arrest.
Back at Cape Town from 1972 he rose to Distinguished Professor before retiring emeritus in 2002, the year he moved to Australia (citizenship 2006) and settled in Adelaide, where a university creative-practice centre now bears his name and lists him as patron. Novels appeared about every three years from Dusklands (1974); he has not set one in South Africa since 2009. Critic James Meek observed after Disgrace a turn from naturalistic storytelling toward essay, polemic, and memoir voiced through alter egos—the magistrate and David Lurie type, recurring novelist Elizabeth Costello, and autobiographical selves. A Jesus trilogy and Spanish-first publication of El polaco (2022) mark his resistance to English-language hegemony.
Honours piled up even as he avoided ceremonies: three CNA Literary Awards, the Jerusalem Prize, Prix Femina étranger, Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and South Africa's Order of Mapungubwe in gold (2005). The Swedish Academy praised his portraits of the outsider's "surprising involvement" when awarding the Nobel on 2 October 2003—the fourth African and second South African laureate after Nadine Gordimer. As of 2020 only Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel, and Margaret Atwood had matched his double Booker. In June 2025 he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia.
Source: J. M. Coetzee
