Nobel Laureate Coetzee to talk at University of York
Posted on 23 May 2006
The South African-born novelist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, will speak in the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall on the University's Heslington campus on 6 June. But tickets went within days of the event being announced.Professor Coetzee will be reunited with countrymen Professor Derek Attridge and Professor David Attwell, both of whom teach in the University of York's Department of English and Related Literature.
Professor Attridge, who is Head of Department, will open the event and Professor Attwell will introduce Professor Coetzee, who now lives in Australia.
J M Coetzee says of the visit: "I look forward to visiting one of the foremost literature departments in the UK, and to seeing again two friends of mine from the old days, Derek Attridge and David Attwell."
John Coetzee went to the University of Cape Town in 1957 and gained degrees in English and Mathematics. He gained a PhD at the University of Texas and subsequently worked at academic institutions in the USA and his native country. He moved to Australia in 2002 and has an honorary position at the University of Adelaide.
I look forward to visiting one of the foremost literature departments in the UK
J M Coetzee
He began writing fiction in 1969. Two of his eight novels won the Booker Prize - The Life & Times of Michael K and Disgrace. He has also written numerous essays. His most recent book is Slow Man, a novel set in Australia and published in 2005.
Professor Attwell is a long-time friend of the novelist. His book, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (University of California Press, 1993) was a milestone in Coetzee criticism and he is also the editor of Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Harvard University Press, 1992), which reprinted a number of Coetzee's essays and included a series of important and revealing interviews with the novelist.
Professor Attridge's study of Coetzee's work, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004, though he has known the Nobel Laureate since the mid 1980s. He has been asked to write an introduction to Coetzee's forthcoming collection of essays, Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005.
Notes to editors:
- A full biography of J M Coetzee is available at www.nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-bio.html.
- A limited number of seats are available for the media at the reading. Contact the University Press Office on 01904 432029.
- Photocall: J M Coetzee will be available for photographs with Derek Attridge and David Attwell at 3.15pm on Tuesday 6 June. Please contact the Press Office for further details.