J. M. Coetzee wins the Nobel Prize in Literature

On 2 October 2003 the Swedish Academy announced that J. M. Coetzee, born in Cape Town in 1940 and the author of Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace, had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the second South African to win it, twelve years after Nadine Gordimer, and the first writer to win the Booker Prize twice. He had not collected either Booker in person, but he went to Stockholm for the Nobel and on 7 December gave his lecture, a story called "He and His Man".