J.M. Coetzee is famed worldwide as the first writer to have won the prestigious Booker prize twice and as a respected critic, but the media-shy South African has scrupulously shunned the media spotlight.
That low-key lifestyle will be harder to maintain following the announcement that the 63-year-old has won the 2003 Nobel prize for literature.
"Celebrity status is something I have managed to dodge quite successfully all my life," he said after winning his second Booker prize in 1999 for Disgrace, a dark allegorical tale of the new South Africa.
Ill at ease with the hype of modern publishing, the former University of Cape Town professor preferred a quiet life in the South Africa where he was born and spent most of his time before emigrating to Australia in 2001.
Coetzee was born in Cape Town on February 9th, 1940. He studied first at Cape Town and later earned a doctorate in literature from the University of Texas at Austin but was forced to return to South Africa when his application for a green card work permit was rejected.
The soft-spoken author, who began writing his first novel, Dusklands, while teaching in the United States, took up a post at his old university, where he taught until 2001.
He was appointed professor of general literature at the university in 1983, a post he relinquished at the end of 2001, when he also quit the country of his birth.
Coetzee's publishers said the intensely private Coetzee and his partner Dorothy Driver emigrated to Australia for personal reasons. Coetzee himself gave no real explanation for the decision but in an email interview with a former student, Coetzee once said he looked forward to getting out of the big city.
"Adelaide strikes me as a city about the right size . . . I like the climate, I like the architecture. If Adelaide is slow, I like the slowness." Other South African literary figures, including playwright Athol Fugard, also live mainly abroad.
While Coetzee himself successfully managed to dodge the media spotlight, it was rarely off his books - making him one of the best known South African authors along with fellow Nobel literature laureate Nadine Gordimer.
The Life and Times of Michael K, Coetzee's fourth novel, won him the Booker prize in 1983, with the story of a young gardener abandoned after his mother's death in a South Africa whose administration is collapsing after years of civil strife.
He made Booker prize history in 1999 when he became the first author to win the award twice. The self-effacing author did not attend the award ceremony on either occasion.
Australian author Peter Carey has since joined Coetzee as a double winner of the Booker.
Coetzee's other literary accolades include the Commonwealth Writers prize for Best Book, three South African CNA awards, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Prize.
Coetzee has written at least nine novels, published several collections of essays and produced a memoir Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, which tells the story of Coetzee's halting struggle towards maturity.
In Boyhood, Coetzee revealed the childhood sources of his fascination with language. Raised in an English-speaking home in spite of an Afrikaans background, he identifies himself as English, but also speaks fluent Afrikaans.
He belongs to two language communities but is something of an outsider to both. That sense of dislocation permeated his work. Coetzee writes in an austere style, painting bleak worlds afflicted by death and violence.
Disgrace describes the fate of a professor who is shamed and loses his job after having an affair with one of his students. The professor goes to live with his daughter on a farm, where they are attacked and his daughter raped.
The Swedish Academy, which presents the Nobel literature prizes, said Coetzee's work was characterised by "well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance".
But the soft-spoken author has rarely been drawn on why he devotes his gifts to presenting such bleak visions.
His latest work of fiction, Elizabeth Costello, has received mixed reviews. - (Reuters)