Seattle Visual Arts

Seattle Arts & Lectures Presents

Booker Prize-Winning Writer

J. M. Coetzee

"[J.M. Coetzee’s] vision goes to the nerve-center of being. What he finds there

is more than most people will ever know about themselves. And he conveys it

with a brilliant writer’s mastery of tension and elegance."

¾ Nadine Gordimer

Seattle Arts & Lectures (SAL) is pleased to present the distinguished writer J. M. Coetzee on Sunday, March 3, 7:30 p.m., at Benaroya Hall in the S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium. Coetzee won the Booker Prize twice, most recently for his 1999 novel, Disgrace, as well as in 1984 for Life & Times of Michael K. While he is careful not to be labeled a "political" writer, much of Coetzee’s work focuses on the complexities of life in post-apartheid South Africa. After the publication of Disgrace, The Sunday Times of London praised the "spare, steely beauty" of Coetzee’s prose, calling him "one of the best novelists alive."

Tickets are available now, priced at $18 (Main floor), $15 (Balcony), and $7.50 (Under 25/Student). Depending on availability, tickets will also be available at Benaroya Hall’s box office on the evening of the event. The box office opens at 6:45 p.m. Call (206) 621-2230 or visit www.lectures.org for tickets and information.

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Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940 and educated in South Africa and the United States as a computer scientist and linguist. For three years he taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, after which he returned to South Africa to pursue his academic career and begin writing. Coetzee is the author of eight books of fiction and five nonfiction works. Coetzee’s writing cuts straight to the heart of human existance with prose that is lucid and fierce. Critics have described his prose as "mesmerizing" and "fiercly revealing." The Spectator (London) called his most recent novel, Disgrace (1999), "taut and tight as a drum, with neither a superfluous word nor careless phrase."

The winner of the 1999 Booker Prize, Disgrace is a stunning account of a man’s midlife crisis that turns into a starkly honest and compelling examination of his relationship with his daughter, contemporary South Africa, and, ultimately, human dignity and love. London’s Sunday Telegraph wrote, "Disgrace explores the furthest reaches of what it means to be human: it is at the frontier of world literature." His first book to win the Booker Prize, Life & Times of Michael K (1984), dealt more directly with South Africa’s political and cultural instability, telling the story of a man who tries to move his dying mother into the country in the midst of civil war.

Much of Coetzee’s writing is inextricably linked to the character of post-apartheid South Africa, but as Caryl Phillips wrote in The New Republic, Coetzee maintains a "wary vigilance" over his imagination on the subject. Writing about Coetzee’s memoir, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997), Phillips pointed out that Coetzee’s writing never collapses into "clumsy antinomies" of black and white, left and right, revolutionary and reactionary, or any other oppositions that "threaten to reduce the complexity of life to easily adhesive slogans." Indeed, he addresses the most sensitive of political issues without asserting a political agenda of his own.

Coetzee has won numerous literary awards, including the CNA Prize (South Africa’s premier literary prize), the Jerusalem Prize, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. His other books include Dusklands (first published in South Africa in 1974, and in America in 1985), In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1982), and The Master of Petersburg (1994). Currently, he is a professor of general literature at the University of Cape Town.

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The evening of the lecture, the Lecture Preview will be presented by Matthew Brogan, Executive Director of Seattle Arts & Lectures. This one-hour talk provides an introduction to the evening’s speaker and his work. The Preview takes place in the S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium in Benaroya Hall on the evening of each lecture, beginning at 5:30 p.m. Every Lecture Preview is free of charge and open to any ticket holder. Benaroya Hall is located in downtown Seattle on the city block between Second and Third Avenues and Union and University streets. Benaroya Hall is easily accessible by public transportation and houses a parking garage that is accessible from Second Avenue.

Seattle Arts & Lectures’ 2001-2002 lecture series concludes on April 8 with Northwest literary treasure Ursula K. Le Guin.

To arrange for American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation, please contact SAL’s office with a minimum of two weeks notice prior to each event.

The evening with J.M. Coetzee is generously underwritten by University Book Store.