J. M. Coetzee

Coetzee trained as a computer programmer and literary scholar, earning a doctorate on Samuel Beckett in Texas before returning to teach in his native South Africa. His early novels, including Waiting for the Barbarians, worked as spare parables that never named the country or regime they indicted, a deliberate evasion of realism he defended as a way of refusing the state's own language.

Life & Times of Michael K won him the Booker Prize in 1983, and Disgrace won it again in 1999 (the first writer to take the prize twice) with a Cape Town professor's disgrace and his daughter's ordeal on a farm that offered readers no consoling resolution. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, and by then had already emigrated to Australia, taking citizenship there in 2006 while continuing to write fiction that circled shame, animal suffering, and the limits of human sympathy.