University of Texas buys professional archive of Nobel Prize-winning writer J.M. Coetzee
The Associated Press
October 10, 2011
The professional archive of Nobel Prize-winning writer J.M. Coetzee will be housed at the University of Texas' Harry Ransom Center humanities library, providing a rare glimpse into the man considered a master storyteller of the South African experience and public injustice.
The Ransom Center's $1.5 million acquisition of the Coetzee collection was scheduled to be formally announced Monday. The collection purchased using private grants and university money includes 155 boxes of manuscripts, notebooks, essays, speeches and letters to his publishers dating back to 1956.
"He writes brilliantly of his native home of South Africa, but the themes and conflicts he explores in his works are universal," Ransom Center Director Thomas Staley said.
Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1940 and earned his doctorate in English, linguistics and Germanic languages at the University of Texas in 1965. He won the Nobel prize for literature in 2003.
"My association with the University of Texas goes back almost a half century," said Coetzee, who now lives in Adelaide, Australia. "It is very satisfying to know that my papers will find a home at the Ransom Center, one of the world's great research institutions."
