Coetzee's parents were bloedsappe, Afrikaners who supported General Jan Smuts and dissociated themselves from the Afrikaner nationalist movement that eventually came to power in South Africa in 1948. Although from an Afrikaans-speaking background, he attended various English medium schools and, after graduating from a Roman Catholic boys' school in 1956, went on to study English literature and mathematics at the University of Cape Town, receiving his B.A. in 1960 and M.A. in 1963. This bilingual upbringing has enabled Coetzee to depict English- and Afrikaans-speaking characters in his fiction with equal facility--an uncommon occurrence in South African literature, which, as part of the legacy of a divided society, is riddled with ethnic stereotypes.
Having found his studies at the University of Cape Town, particularly in English, tedious, Coetzee left South Africa for England in 1962 to pursue a career as a computer programmer, working for International Business Machines (IBM) for two years and then for International Computers from 1964 to 1965. He completed his master's thesis in 1963 and married Philippa Jubber the same year; the couple had two children, Nicholas, born in 1966, and Gisela, born in 1968. Evidently computer programming did not prove that much more rewarding: under a Fulbright exchange program, Coetzee, after only four years in England, left for the United States and commenced work on a doctoral thesis in English at the University of Texas at Austin.
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