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...

Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940, J. M. Coetzee is probably the best known and most influential South African writer after Nadine Gordimer. Unlike Gordimer, however, Coetzee often avoids strict social...

Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel by the South African author J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. The novel was published in 1980 and is regarded as one of Coetzee's finest pieces of writing. It was chosen by Penguin for...

overwhelmed by the wars next door, can jordan ever really come first? AMMAN, JORDAN To sit for tea in the dim, moldy cafe in the courtyard of the buildings where the Iraqi refugees gather is to hold out hope for the demolishing end...

Waiting for the Barbarians in Erfurt Philip Glass must be one of the most influential living composers, so when the world premiere of his new opera, Waiting for the Barbarians, took place in Erfurt on 10 September, many of his devotees were happy...

In the following essay, Wenzel argues that although Waiting for the Barbarians does not deal explicitly with sociopolitical issues of South Africa, the image of the tortured human body around which the novel revolves represents "a nexus of the political and the poststructural, the historic and the linguistic," which necessarily includes events in South Africa.

In the following essay, Olsen analyzes Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians as a groundbreaking work of postmodern fantasy, one that “recharts, interrogates, challenges, and dismantles dominant cultural myths.”

In the following essay, Jolly discusses the physical territory of both geographical locations and of the human body as a metaphor for colonial invasion in Waiting for the Barbarians.