Dzhon Kutzee

John Maxwell Coetzee is a South African writer, literary scholar, critic, and linguist. He was the first writer to be awarded the Booker Prize twice. He is the recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.

He was born in Cape Town on 9 February 1940 into a family of Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch settlers. John was the elder of two children. His mother worked as a primary school teacher. His father was a lawyer, but practiced very rarely. From 1941 to 1945, he served in the South African Armed Forces in Italy and North Africa. Coetzee has Polish roots in his family tree. His great-grandfather Balthazar (or Balcer) Dubiel immigrated from Poland to South Africa. Although Coetzee's parents were not British subjects, English was always the spoken language in their home.

Coetzee spent most of his youth in Cape Town and Worcester. This is reflected in his fictionalized memoir Boyhood (1997), devoted to his childhood years. He received his primary education at a school in Cape Town and at a school in Worcester. His secondary education was at a school run by the Catholic Marist order. Coetzee began studying at the University of Cape Town in 1957 and successfully completed it, receiving a Bachelor of Arts with honors in English in 1960 and a Bachelor of Arts with honors in mathematics in 1961. In the early 1960s, namely from 1962 to 1965, Coetzee moved to London, where he worked for some time as a programmer at IBM. In 1963 he received a master's degree from the University of Cape Town, writing a thesis on the works of the English novelist Ford M. Ford. His memories of England were later reflected in the novel Youth (2002), the second volume of his autobiographical prose.

In 1963 he married Philippa Jubber (1939-1991). Their marriage lasted 17 years, until 1980. They had two children — a daughter, Gisela, and a son, Nicholas, who died at the age of 23 in an accident. In 1965 Coetzee entered the University of Texas at Austin and in 1968 received a doctorate in English, linguistics, and Germanic languages. His dissertation was