Coetzee collects Nobel prize
2003-12-10 20:42
Stockholm - An intensely private writer was honoured on Wednesday at the Nobel Prize awards ceremony.
JM Coetzee, 63, received the literature prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf, the Swedish monarch. He is the second South African to pick up the award after Nadine Gordimer, who won it in 1991.
Coetzee is a solitary figure, who rarely communicates with the media and prefers doing so by e-mail. He declined to show up to collect his two Booker prizes in Britain, but was in Stockholm to accept the Nobel, although he passed on the traditional news conference.
"Coetzee sees through the obscene poses and false pomp of history," said Swedish Academy member Per Waestberg when presenting the award.
"With intellectual honesty and density of feeling, in a prose of icy precision, you have unveiled the masks of our civilisation and uncovered the topography of evil," Waestberg said.
Among Coetzee's novels are Disgrace, Life and Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians and Age of Iron.
The Nobel prizes are usually announced in October and are handed out every year on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of Nobel, a Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. The first awards ceremony took place in 1901.
In his will, Nobel gave little guidance on selecting winners, stating only the prizes should be given to those who "shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind".
- AP