University of Chicago Visiting Professor wins second Booker Prize

South-African novelist J.M. Coetzee, Visiting Professor on the Committee on Social thought at the University of Chicago, has been awarded the 1999 Booker Prize, Britain’s top fiction award, for his novel Disgrace. Coetzee was awarded the Booker Prize previously in 1983 for Life & Times of Michael K, making him the first author to win the prestigious award twice in its 31-year history.

Disgrace tells the story of David Lurie, a 52-year-old professor in Cape Town who seeks refuge at his daughter’s farm after refusing to apologize for an impulsive affair with a student. A savage and disturbing attack brings into relief faults in the relationship between father and daughter. Pitching the moral code of political correctness against the values of romantic poetry, Disgrace examines dichotomies both in personal relationships and in the unaccountability of one culture to another.

Coetzee is currently in residence at the University of Chicago, where he is teaching a seminar on autobiography. As both teacher and author, he says he has reconciled the demands of pedagogy with his life as a contemporary writer. When asked whether the two activities have impacted each other, Coetzee replied, “I can't say there's really much of a relationship between the two activities that emerges in my work. This book [Disgrace] is the first to have an element of what could be called the academic novel.”

U.S. awareness of the prestige of the award has helped to convince Coetzee that the Booker Prize, which is currently available only to English-language authors outside of the United States, ought to be a competition open to American authors as well. “One thing that has struck me since getting news of the award is how many Americans know about the Booker Prize, and the weight it carries,” he said. “It's my feeling that the time has come for the artificial restriction that limits consideration to novels written outside of the United States to be lifted. Then the prize will truly be an award for the best novel in the English language in a given year,” he argued.

Coetzee says that the list of books he recently has been reading includes a biography of Daniel Defoe by Richard West; Extinction by Thomas Bernhard; The Emigrants by W. D. Sebald; and a collection of documents on aspects of French history titled Realms of Memory.

Coetzee serves as professor of general literature at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, where on Jan. 1, he will assume the title of distinguished professor of literature. He is the author of seven novels, including The Master of Petersburg and the memoir Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. He also has written three books of criticism, most recently, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, published by the University of Chicago Press.