PALE Group

Go to this link to read about the hiyab and write your opinion for El País English Edition. Choose one of these genres.
a) Letter to the editor
b) Opinion article

Second Book Club

I started reading his novels a year before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. Since then I kept devouring his books one after another, and the more I read the more fascinated I bacame by the world of his imagination and his amazing writing style.


"Disgrace" is said to be one of the best. It won the Booker Prize in 1999, the year in which it was published. A 2006 poll of "literary luminaries" by The Observer newspaper named it as the "greatest novel of the last 25 years" written in English outside the United States.[1]

The book, which is a bleak look at the country, was made into a film in 2008 with John Malkovitch as the protagonist.

"This is Coetzee's second book (after Life and Times of Michael K) where man is broken down almost to nothing before he finds some tiny measure of redemption in his forced acceptance of the realities of life and death. Coetzee has always situated his characters in extreme situations that compel them to explore what it means to be human.[7] Though the novel is sparse in style, it covers a number of topics: personal shame, a changing country, animal rights, and Romantic poetry and its symbolism.[8]" (Wikipedia)

Here you can read more about him and his biography, main works and so on.
Born in the 40s, this South African writer of Dutch origin, was bilingual from early childhood, as he spoke both English and Afrikaners. Later he studied French, and became an expert in French Literature and also an essayist and critic. Apart from being a great mathematician and linguist, Coetzee has always been a committed individual who has advocated against apartheid, censorship and animal cruelty.

"When he initially moved to Australia, he had cited the South African government's lax attitude to crime in that country as a reason for the move, leading to a spat with Thabo Mbeki, who, speaking of Coetzee's novel Disgrace stated that "South Africa is not only a place of rape".[21] In 1999, the African National Congress submission to an investigation into racism in the media by the South African Human Rights Commission named Disgrace as a novel exploiting racist stereotypes.[55] However, when Coetzee won his Nobel Prize, Mbeki congratulated him "on behalf of the South African nation and indeed the continent of Africa".[56]" (Wikipedia)

Fiction

* Dusklands (1974) ISBN 0-14-024177-9
* In the Heart of the Country (1977) ISBN 0-14-006228-9
* Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) ISBN 0-14-006110-X
* Life & Times of Michael K (1983) ISBN 0-14-007448-1
* Foe (1986) ISBN 0-14-009623-X
* Age of Iron (1990) ISBN 0-14-027565-7
* The Master of Petersburg (1994) ISBN 0-14-023810-7
* The Lives of Animals (1999) ISBN 0-691-07089-X
* Disgrace (1999) ISBN 0-09-928952-0
* Elizabeth Costello (2003) ISBN 0-670-03130-5
* Slow Man (2005) ISBN 0-670-03459-2
* Diary of a Bad Year (2007) ISBN 1-846-55120-X

[edit] Fictionalised autobiography / autofiction

* Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) ISBN 0-14-026566-X
* Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002) ISBN 0-670-03102-X
* Summertime (2009) ISBN 1-846-55318-0

[edit] Non-fiction

* White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988) ISBN 0-300-03974-3
* Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1992) ISBN 0-674-21518-4
* Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996), University of Chicago Press [hence, US spelling "offense"] ISBN 0-226-11176-8
* Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999 (2002) ISBN 0-142-00137-6
* Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000–2005 (2007) ISBN 0-099-50614-9
(Wikipedia)


Websites:
BBC on Coetzee





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