Doesn't Happen Every Day: Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee to Speak at UT

Tonight is your chance to see famously reclusive author and academic J.M. Coetzee in person. (That’s cut-ZEE-uh, should you need to say it aloud.) Winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature and one of UT Austin’s most prominent graduates - he received a PhD in Linguistics here, back in the sixties - Coetzee will be speaking in a rare public appearance at UT's LBJ Auditorium at 6 p.m. on Wednesday. He’ll talk about his time in Texas and his boyhood in South Africa.

Born in Cape Town in 1940, Coetzee’s spare, powerful fiction grapples with such heavy subjects as apartheid, the War on Terror, aging, and animal cruelty. He was the first author to be awarded the Booker Award twice—for Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999). One of his best-known works, 1980’s allegorical novel Waiting for the Barbarians, was turned into an opera by Phillip Glass, which was premiered in 2007 by our own Austin Lyric Opera. Denied U.S. citizenship in 1971 for participation in anti-Vietnam-War protests, Coetzee now resides in Adelaide, Australia.

Fellow South African writer Rian Malan says of Coetzee: “A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word." Given this legendary reticence and the indisputable brilliance of Coetzee’s fiction, tonight's talk is a not-to-be-missed literary event. It’s free and open to the public, but you’ll need to RSVP and get there early (seating is on a first come, first served basis). If you can't make to the auditorium, you can watch live from UT's event page.