Life and Times of Michael K

A Novel

From author of Waiting for the Barbarians and Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee. 

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. 


In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience—the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.
  • WINNER
    Man Booker Prize for Fiction
  • WINNER
    Nobel Prize in Literature
"An outstanding achievment." —Nadine Gordimer

"A major work of crystalline intensity." —Los Angeles Times

"So purifying to the senses that one comes away feeling that one's eye has been sharpened, one's hearing vivified." —The New York Times Book Review

© Alejandro Guyot
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, J. M. Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a PhD degree in literature. In 1972, he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands; Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award; and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essay collections. He has won many other literary prizes, including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999, he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. View titles by J. M. Coetzee

About

From author of Waiting for the Barbarians and Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee. 

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. 


In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience—the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.

Awards

  • WINNER
    Man Booker Prize for Fiction
  • WINNER
    Nobel Prize in Literature

Reviews

"An outstanding achievment." —Nadine Gordimer

"A major work of crystalline intensity." —Los Angeles Times

"So purifying to the senses that one comes away feeling that one's eye has been sharpened, one's hearing vivified." —The New York Times Book Review

Author

© Alejandro Guyot
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, J. M. Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a PhD degree in literature. In 1972, he returned to South Africa and joined the faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction include Dusklands; Waiting for the Barbarians, which won South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency Literary Award; and the Life and Times of Michael K., for which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life, and several essay collections. He has won many other literary prizes, including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 1999, he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. View titles by J. M. Coetzee