SA delighted with Coetzee
2003-10-02 15:09
Johannesburg - South African academics and publishers expressed delight on Thursday at novelist JM Coetzee winning the Nobel Literature Prize 2003.
"It is about time," said Michael Marais, who wrote his doctorate on the South African-born author and is a lecturer at the Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg.
"He is too good a writer to be continued to be ignored," Marais told AFP.
Coetzee, who now lives in Australia, won the prestigious award on Thursday, following in the footsteps of anti-apartheid activist Nadine Gordimer in 1991.
The Nobel committee said a fundamental theme in Coetzee's novels included the values and conduct resulting from South Africa's apartheid system, "which in his view, could arise anywhere".
David Attwell, an expert on Coetzee's works at the University of Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, said he was one of the most important novelists in the English language.
"He is deeply immersed in the novel tradition, and uses realist, modernist and post-modernist novels to engage with the difficult history of South Africa," Atwell said.
"It is very important for South African literature and the novel itself because he is taking it into a new terrain."
Stephen Johnson, the managing director of Random House South Africa, which distributes his books, said he was thrilled with the news.
"For the author there is extraordinary prestige in being a Nobel Laureate. The man is a genius. He says so much with so few words," Johnson told the SAPA news agency.
In Senegal, a spokesperson for a Senegalese group of intellectuals said, "We can only rejoice and congratulate him".
The Nobel prize shows that "culture transcends borders, colours, languages and ethnic groups," said Abdulaye Vilane of the west African country's Committee for Initiatives by Senegalese Intellectuals (CIIS).
JM Coetzee joins six other South African Nobel laureates.
In 1993, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk won the Peace Prize. Nadine Gordimer won the Literature Prize in 1991, and Desmond Tutu won the Peace Prize 1983. Albert Lutuli also won the Peace Prize in 1960.
A pre-independence South African, Max Theiler, was also awarded the Medicine Prize for his discoveries concerning yellow fever in 1951, when the Union of South Africa was still a self-governing state of the British Empire.