J.M. Coetzee (b. 1940)

J.M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940, into an Afrikaner family that spoke English at home — and into the privilege of the white descendants of Dutch settlers who built a state on racial hierarchy and called it by another name. He spent his life writing about people who inherit structures they did not design and cannot disown.

His prose is clinical in the most precise sense of that word: the detachment of a physician at the bedside of something dying. He does not explain his characters' moral failures or offer the reader a position of safety. The present tense he uses in Disgrace refuses the consolation of distance — everything happens now, nothing is safely past.

He received the Nobel Prize in 2003. The year before, he had emigrated to Australia without public explanation. His scrutiny, which was always incorruptible, had always included himself.

His Nobel Lecture (2003) is not a lecture. It is a story, "He and His Man", about Robinson Crusoe and the writer who invented him. Coetzee read it aloud in Stockholm. Read it, or watch him, at NobelPrize.org.