John M. Coetzee, recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in literature, has returned to Stanford this quarter as the Stein Visiting Writer in the creative writing program. He was a visiting fellow at the Humanities Center in 2001 and taught in the English department last year.
“All of us in creative writing are true admirers of his work and feel his presence will bring a unique benefit to the students who work with him,” says English professor Eavan Boland, who directs the program. “He will be teaching a course called Reading for Writers, which we think of as a quarter-long conversation with students, based around the reading and writing of fine fiction.”
Coetzee is “a writer who combines a dark, ethical vision with a stripped-bare, lyrical prose,” Boland says. She adds that what appears to many readers as “a perpetual contradiction—between the restraint of his style and the volatility of the content—makes his work rich, moving and often disturbing, as in his novel Disgrace.”
A literary scholar, essayist and novelist, the 64-year-old Coetzee is a native of South Africa. He is the first author to win Britain’s Booker Prize for fiction twice—in 1983 for Life and Times of Michael K, and in 1999 for Disgrace.
