Aussie Coetzee

Nobel laureate John M. Coetzee (66), the reclusive South African author, has become an Australian citizen at a special ceremony held as part of the Adelaide Writers' Week. He moved to Adelaide four years ago with his partner Dorothy Driver. Coetzee first visited Australia in 1991 and was "attracted by the free and generous spirit of the people, by the beauty of the land itself and, when I first saw Adelaide, by the grace of the city" He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003 and is an honorary research fellow with the University of Adelaide's English department. He is also a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago. Coetzee is a two-time winner of the Booker Prize for Life and Times of Michael K and Disgrace. He retired as an English professor at Cape Town University in January 2002, a post he had held since 1984.