J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) was a white South African novelist whose writings reflected strong anti-imperialist sentiments. John M. Coetzee, the son of a sheep farmer, was born in Cape Town in 1940 and was educated in both South Africa and the United State...

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 C...

"When some men suffer unjustly . . . it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it." This observation by the Magistrate in J. M. Coetzee's 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, may well serve as an epigraph to the body o...

Dusklands is among the first truly modern novels in English written and published in South Africa. Doris Lessing and Dan Jacobson left their homelands many years ago and have abandoned southern African subject matter; Nadine Gordimer, Alan Paton and others continue to write well and conservatively and are published abroad. Although the Afrikaans-speaking section of this country has always been equated with conservatism, it is the Afrikaans novelists who were the pioneers in the field of the avant-garde nove...

[Dusklands] was a most authentic sounding diary of an early explorer, a device which allowed [Coetzee] to show the jelling of rigid attitudes and the props needed to establish and maintain the master/servant relationship, which is still the crutch of the South African establishment. [From the Heart of the Country] continues this probe. Bold in concept, it purports to be the diary of a spinster on an isolated and unspecified desert sheep farm…. The reader soon realizes that these are the untrustworthy...