NOBEL PRIZE: The South African novelist J.M. Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature yesterday, a choice hailed by critics who described him as an elusive man but accessible, politically engaged writer.
A white South African born in 1940 and raised in an English-speaking home in spite of an Afrikaans background, Coetzee portrays a desolate vision of his racially divided country with a lean, allegorical style which has drawn comparisons with the Czech writer Franz Kafka and with Samuel Beckett.
The Swedish Academy, announcing the prize, said Coetzee was "ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of Western civilisation".
Several hours after the announcement, the 63-year-old writer issued a written statement through the University of Chicago, where he teaches. "I received the news in a phone call from Stockholm at 6 a.m. It came as a complete surprise - I was not even aware that the announcement was pending," he said.
Despite wide critical acclaim - he was the first author to win the prestigious Booker Prize twice, in 1983 with The Life and Times of Michael K and in 1999 for Disgrace - the 63-year-old writer shuns the spotlight. He did not turn up for either Booker ceremony and could not immediately be tracked down by the Swedish Academy to be told he had won the 10 million crown (€1.1 million) Nobel Prize.
"I should have asked them to forget the ceremony and send the cheque in the mail," says Elizabeth Costello, protagonist in his 2003 book of the same name, when faced with a prize-giving.
Long tipped for the Nobel, Coetzee is regarded as an author who "writes prose at a higher level than most novelists writing in English", according to Mr Thomas Jones, an editor of the London Review of Books.
"He is a very literary writer but his literary protagonists are politically engaged," he said, adding that Coetzee's books were often also very funny.
"It is a superb choice," said Mr Michael Gorra, professor at Smith College in Massachusetts. He said Coetzee was "accessible to anybody who reads serious fiction" and called Disgrace "one of the most piercing novels I have read in many years".
Prof David Attwell at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg welcomed the decision as a recognition of Coetzee's "contribution to the modern novel and the post-colonial novel" and his "oblique, complex view of history and identity".
Swedish Academy member Mr Per Wastberg said Coetzee was "one of the most easily read Nobel laureates in a long time" but warned reporters they would find him "particularly difficult to catch, as he rarely gives interviews".
Coetzee teaches at the University of Adelaide in Australia but was spending a term in Chicago.
Coetzee's reputation rests on his treatment of post-colonial and post-apartheid South Africa - in common with fellow South African Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer - in books that wrestle with moral dilemmas like the violent eviction of white farmers.
"I have always been more interested in the past than the future - the past and the way the past casts its shadow over the present," he said in a recent interview.
The African National Congress said it hoped the prizes for Coetzee and Gordimer would "encourage publishers and readers to realise the continent's vast untapped literary potential".