J. M. Coetzee published his first novel, Dusklands , in 1974 and since then has become one of South Africa's leading writers. As the many literary awards he has received testify, however, his reputation is not only local but international.

John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town on 9 February 1940. He spent most of his childhood in Cape Town and Worcester--a period of his life that he recalls in his autobiography, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997). It is noteworthy that a section of Boyhood is devoted to the holidays that Coetzee spent as a child on his uncle's farm in the Karoo, the semidesert region of the Cape Province. In all probability his perennial fascination with the primeval aspect of the South African landscape stems from his boyhood visits to this region, which forms the main setting of his novel Life & Times of Michael K (1983).

Coetzee's parents were bloedsappe, Afrikaners...