Nobel Prizes: Year In Review 2003 | Britannica.com Nobel Prizes: Year In Review 2003 Written By: Originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year. Presented as archival content. Prize for Peace Ringling Bros. Folds Its Tent The 2003 Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer, writer, and teacher who had gained prominence as an advocate for democracy and human rights. She was known particularly for her efforts to establish and protect the rights of women and children in the face of a hostile Iranian government. In announcing the award, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, “As a lawyer, judge, lecturer, writer, and activist, she has spoken out clearly and strongly in her country, Iran, and far beyond its borders. She has stood up as a sound professional, a courageous person, and has never heeded the threats to her own safety.” She was the first Iranian to be awarded the Prize for Peace. Ebadi, who was born in 1947 in Hamadān, Iran, received a degree in law in 1969 from the University of Tehran.

She was one of the first women judges in Iran and from 1975 to 1979 was head of the city court of Tehran. After the 1979 revolution and the establishment of an Islamic republic, however, women were deemed unsuitable to serve as judges, and she was dismissed from the position. She then practiced law and taught at the University of Tehran, and she became known as a fearless defender of the rights of Iranian citizens. In court she defended women and dissidents, as well as a number of victims of the conservative religious regime, including the families of writers and intellectuals murdered in 1999–2000. She also distributed evidence implicating government officials in the murders of students at the University of Tehran in 1999, for which she was jailed for three weeks in 2000. Found guilty, she was given a prison term, barred from practicing law for five years, and fined, although her sentence was later suspended. Among her writings were The Rights of the Child: A Study of Legal Aspects of Children’s Rights in Iran (1994) and History and Documentation of Human Rights in Iran (2000).

She also was founder and head of the Association for Support of Children’s Rights in Iran. Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace was commonly understood to have political overtones, and this was especially evident in 2003. The choice of Ebadi was widely viewed as an attempt by the Norwegian Nobel Committee to support the reformers in Iran against that country’s hard-line clerics and to promote the view that Islam was compatible with equality before the law, freedom of speech and of religion, and other democratic practices, as well as with the doctrine of human rights. The committee said, “Ebadi is a conscious Muslim. She sees no conflict between Islam and fundamental human rights. It is important to her that the dialogue between the different cultures and religions of the world should take as its point of departure their shared values.” Although Muslims had earlier won the Nobel Prize for Peace—Egyptian Pres.

Anwar el-Sadat shared the prize in 1978 with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat shared the prize in 1994 with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres—Ebadi was the first Muslim woman to be given the award. Robert Rauch Prize for Economics The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded in 2003 to American Robert F. Engle and Clive W.J. Granger of the U.K. for their respective contributions to the development of sophisticated techniques for the analysis of time series data. Their econometric methods enabled a chronological succession or series of values of nonstationary and volatile variables, such as household consumption, inflation, and stock prices, to be measured with greater accuracy than was possible with the standard methods previously used to find explanations of movements of variables over time. The two prizewinners spent much of their careers in the 1970s and ’80s on their seminal work at the University of California, San Diego.

Journey Around the World Engle received the Nobel for the improved mathematical techniques he developed for the evaluation and more accurate forecasting of risk, which enabled researchers to test if and how volatility in one period was related to volatility in another period. This had particular relevance in financial market analysis in which the investment returns of an asset were assessed against its risk and stock prices and returns could exhibit extreme volatility. While periods of strong turbulence caused large fluctuations in prices in stock markets, these were often followed by relative calm and slight fluctuations. Inherent in Engle’s autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (known as ARCH) model approach was the concept that while most volatility is embedded in the random error, its variance depends on previously realized random errors, with large errors being followed by large errors and small by small. This contrasted with earlier models wherein the random error was assumed to be constant over time. Engle’s methods and the ARCH model had led to a proliferation of tools for analyzing stocks and had enabled economists to make more accurate forecasts. Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies Granger developed concepts and analytic methods to establish meaningful relationships between nonstationary variables, such as exchange rates and inflation rates.

His adoption of long- and short-run perspectives increased understanding of the longer-term changes in macroeconomic indicators where, for example, a country’s annual GDP might grow long term but in the short term might suffer because of a sharp rise in commodity prices or a global economic downturn. Granger demonstrated that estimated relationships between variables that changed over time could be nonsensical and misleading because the variables were wrongly perceived as having a relationship. Even where a relationship did exist, it could be a purely temporary one. Fundamental to his methods was his discovery that a specific combination of two or more nonstationary time series could be stationary, a combination for which he invented the term cointegration. This was in accord with the economic theory that asserts that two economic variables that share equilibrium may deviate in the short term but over the long run will adjust to equilibrium. Through his cointegration analysis, Granger showed that the dynamics in exchange rates and prices, for example, are driven by a tendency to smooth out deviations from the long-run equilibrium exchange rate and short-run fluctuations around the adjustment path.

Trending Topics Eyjafjallajökull volcano Engle was born in November 1942 in Syracuse, N.Y., and was educated at Williams College, Williamstown, Mass. (B.S., 1964), and Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. (M.S., 1966; Ph.D., 1969). He was on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1969–75) until he moved to the University of California, where he became a professor in 1977 and later the chair in economics. In 1999 he transferred to the Stern School of Business at New York University, and from 2000 he was the Michael Armellino Professor in the Management of Financial Services. His teaching and research interests were in financial econometrics covering equities, futures and options, interest rates, and exchange rates. Engle was a fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Statistical Association. He also held associate editorships on several academic journals, notably the Journal of Applied Econometrics, of which he was coeditor (1985–89).

Granger was born in Swansea, Wales, on Sept. 4, 1934, and was educated at the University of Nottingham, Eng. (B.A., 1955; Ph.D., 1959), where he became a lecturer in statistics in the mathematics department. In 1974 he took up a professorship at the University of California. He held fellowships at the International Institute of Forecasters, the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Economic Association, among others, and was a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. Granger’s books and academic papers covered a wide range of subjects from time series analysis and forecasting to price research, statistical theory, and applied statistics. Janet H. Clark Prize for Literature The 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to South African author J.M. Coetzee, a preeminent and uncompromising voice in the struggle for human dignity and self-preservation. An innovative and provocative novelist, essayist, and literary critic, Coetzee gained international recognition early in his career and was the first writer to receive the United Kingdom’s Booker Prize (now the Man Booker Prize) twice.

He belonged to the generation of South African writers—including André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, and Mongane Wally Serote—that emerged during the apartheid era. Coetzee was the second South African Nobel laureate for literature and the fourth African laureate, after Wole Soyinka of Nigeria in 1986, Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt in 1988, and Coetzee’s compatriot Nadine Gordimer in 1991. Born on Feb. 9, 1940, in Cape Town, S.Af., John Maxwell Coetzee was the son of Afrikaners, but he was reared bilingual, attending English-language schools. He studied at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where he earned a B.A. in English in 1960 and another in mathematics the following year. In 1962 Coetzee left South Africa for England, where he worked as a computer programmer and completed an M.A. from UCT. He earned a Ph.D. in English in 1969 from the University of Texas at Austin.

From 1968 to 1971 Coetzee taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and he then returned to South Africa, where he became a lecturer in 1972 and, later, a professor of literature at UCT. Highly regarded as a writer of striking originality, Coetzee experimented with diverse literary forms from historical fiction to political fable. His first published work, entitled Dusklands (1974), consisted of two novellas, “The Vietnam Project” and “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” which examined colonialism in the 20th and 18th centuries, respectively, and incriminated the policies of both the United States and colonial South Africa. His novel In the Heart of the Country (U.S. title From the Heart of the Country) was written originally as a bilingual Afrikaans-English text but was first published in a wholly English version in 1977. The bilingual edition was issued in South Africa a year later. This work explored the emotional and psychological demise of its protagonist, whose vision of reality is distorted by the solitude and barrenness of her existence.

The novel received South Africa’s Central News Agency (CNA) Literary Award. The publication in 1980 of the politically inspired Waiting for the Barbarians established Coetzee as a major South African writer, receiving both the CNA Literary Award and Britain’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The critically acclaimed Life & Times of Michael K (1983) received a third CNA Literary Award, the Prix Femina Étranger in France, and the Booker Prize. In 1986 Coetzee published the enigmatic Foe, a postmodern retelling of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). His novel Age of Iron (1990) was a tour de force set in contemporary South Africa; it examined the variations and consequences of complicity with a political regime guided by racial prejudice and repression. Coetzee’s allegorical narrative The Master of Petersburg (1994) was followed in 1999 by the Booker Prize-winning Disgrace, a novel of postapartheid South Africa in which a university professor charged with sexual harassment must confront the ramifications of guilt and retribution.

Elizabeth Costello (2003), a fictional hybrid incorporating selections of Coetzee’s previously published nonfiction, analyzed the relationship between the writer and society. Coetzee published two volumes of autobiographical memoirs, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) and its sequel, Youth (2002). His works of nonfiction included White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988), Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1992), Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996), and Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999 (2001). As a novelist Coetzee combined ambiguity with irony to produce fiction of extraordinary breadth and integrity. Cited by the Swedish Academy as a writer “who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider,” Coetzee filled the void of isolation and despair with a balance of tension and empathy, as his protagonist from In the Heart of the Country proclaims: “We are the castaways of God as we are the castaways of history” who “wish only to be at home in the world.” Steven R.

Serafin Prize for Chemistry Two American scientists shared the 2003 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for discoveries about structure and operation of the many crucial porelike channels that perforate the outer surface of cells in humans and other living things. Peter Agre of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md., received half the prize for the discovery of water channels in cell membranes; and Roderick MacKinnon, of Rockefeller University, New York City, got the other half for research on ion channels. Agre was born Jan. 30, 1949, in Northfield, Minn. He earned a medical doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1974. In 1981, following postgraduate training and a fellowship, he returned to Hopkins, where in 1993 he advanced to professor of biological chemistry. MacKinnon, born Feb. 19, 1956, in Burlington, Mass., gained an M.D. degree from Tufts University’s School of Medicine, Boston, in 1982.

After practicing medicine for several years, he turned to basic research, beginning in 1986 with postdoctoral work on ion channels at Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass. In 1989 he joined Harvard University, and in 1996 he moved to Rockefeller as a professor and laboratory head. A year later he was appointed an investigator at Rockefeller’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Biologists realized in the mid-1800s that specialized openings must exist in cell membranes, the film of fatty material that encloses the cells of living organisms. Water, for instance, flows in and out of cells without leakage of other essential substances from inside the cell. Later in the century scientists discovered that ions also enjoy free passage in and out of cells. Ions are electrically charged atoms, such as those of sodium and potassium. Transport of ions through the membrane of motor nerve cells, for example, is needed to trigger the nerve impulses that ultimately make muscles contract or relax. Many diseases involving the kidneys, heart, and nervous system occur when ion channels do not work normally.

With water and ion channels so important in health and disease, generations of scientists in the 20th century tried to find them, determine their structure, and understand how they work. Not until 1988, however, did Agre isolate a type of protein molecule in the cell membrane that he soon came to believe was the long-sought water channel. One test of his hypothesis involved comparing how cells with and without the protein in their membranes responded when placed in a water solution. Cells with the protein swelled up as water flowed in, while those lacking the protein remained the same size. Agre named the protein aquaporin. Researchers subsequently discovered a whole family of the proteins in animals, plants, and even bacteria. Two different aquaporins were found to play a major role in the mechanism by which human kidneys concentrate dilute urine and return the extracted water to the blood. While Agre was beginning his landmark work, MacKinnon was devoting most of his time to treating patients. He switched to research at age 30 after he had become fascinated with the studies being done on ion channels. The channels, which also proved to be proteins, not only admitted ions without allowing cell contents to seep out but also were very selective.

They seemed to have “filters” that passed one type of ion—potassium, for instance—while blocking others, but no one knew how those filters worked. MacKinnon understood that the problem could be solved by obtaining sharper images of channels with X-ray diffraction, a technique that involves passing X-rays through crystals of a material to create images of their molecular structure. He rapidly became expert in X-ray diffraction technology and within a few years astonished scientists who had spent entire careers in ion-channel research by reporting the three-dimensional molecular structure of an ion channel. His results, obtained in 1998, allowed MacKinnon to explain how the ion filter allowed passage of potassium ions but blocked sodium ions, even through the latter are smaller. The channel, MacKinnon found, has an architecture sized in a way that easily strips potassium ions—but not sodium ions—of their associated water molecules and allows them to slip through. MacKinnon also discovered a molecular “sensor” in the end of the channel nearest the cell’s interior that reacts to conditions around the cell, sending signals that open and close the channel at the appropriate times.

His pioneering work allowed scientists to pursue the development of drugs for diseases—e.g., of the heart or nervous system—in which ion channels play a role. Michael Woods Prize for Physics Three scientists who explained how certain materials develop their unusual properties of superconductivity and superfluidity when chilled to very low temperatures were awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for Physics. Their theories laid the foundation for new insights into the properties of matter and for practical applications in medicine and other areas. Sharing the prize equally were Alexei A. Abrikosov of Argonne (Ill.) National Laboratory; Vitaly L. Ginzburg of the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow; and Anthony J. Leggett of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Abrikosov was born June 25, 1928, in Moscow. He received doctorates in physics from the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Physical Problems (now the P.L. Kapitsa Institute) in 1951 and 1955.

Following work spanning several decades at scientific institutions and universities in the former Soviet Union, he joined Argonne in 1991, becoming distinguished scientist in its materials science division. Ginzburg, born Oct. 4, 1916, in Moscow, earned a doctorate in physics at M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1938. He headed the theory group at the Lebedev Institute from 1971 to 1988. Leggett, born March 26, 1938, in London, received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Oxford in 1964. In 1967 he joined the faculty of the University of Sussex, where he served until 1983, when he moved to the University of Illinois. The three did their work between the 1950s and the 1970s in the field of quantum physics, which deals with effects that occur among the subatomic particles that make up matter.

Usually these effects are unnoticeable in the everyday world of larger objects, but in selecting the winners for the 2003 prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences focused attention on two quantum phenomena that manifest themselves in the familiar world. Physicists had known about superconductivity since 1911, when it was observed in the metal mercury. Superconductors are materials that lose resistance to the flow of electricity when cooled below a certain critical (and typically very low) temperature. Research on the topic had practical importance because electrical resistance accounted for costly losses in long-distance power lines. Resistance in copper and aluminum wire caused electricity to be wasted as heat en route from generating stations to consumers. Electrical resistance also was a barrier to the development of increasingly powerful electromagnets. The 1972 Nobel physics prize went to scientists who developed the first theory explaining why certain metals, termed type I superconductors, lose electrical resistance. At temperatures near absolute zero (−273.15 °C, or −459.67 °F), the electrons in these materials form pairs (Cooper pairs) whose interaction with the material’s atoms allows them to flow as electric current without resistance.

The theory, however, did not explain superconductivity in another group of materials that had important potential industrial and commercial uses. Unlike type I superconductors, these materials, termed type II, remain superconducting even in the presence of very powerful magnetic fields, with superconductivity and magnetism existing within them at the same time. Abrikosov devised a theoretical explanation for type II superconductivity. His starting point was an earlier theory about type I superconductors that Ginzburg and others had developed and refined. “Although these theories were formulated in the 1950s,” stated the Swedish Academy, “they have gained renewed importance in the rapid development of materials with completely new properties. Materials can now be made superconductive at increasingly high temperatures and strong magnetic fields.” Ginzberg’s and Abrikosov’s theoretical achievements enabled other scientists to create and test new superconducting materials and build more powerful electromagnets. Among the practical results were magnets critical for the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners used in medical diagnostics. (See Prize for Physiology or Medicine.) The materials used in MRI magnets are all type II superconductors.

Leggett did his prizewinning research on the related quantum phenomenon of superfluidity, in which certain extremely cold liquid substances flow without internal resistance, or viscosity. Superfluids exhibit a variety of weird behaviour, including the ability to flow up the sides and out the top of containers. Scientists had known since the 1930s that the common form of helium, the isotope helium-4, becomes a superfluid when chilled. A theoretical explanation for the phenomenon won the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physics. In the 1970s researchers discovered that the explanation did not work for the much rarer helium isotope helium-3, which was also found to be a superfluid. Leggett filled the gap in theoretical research by showing that electrons in helium-3 form pairs in a situation similar to, but much more complicated than, the electron pairs that form in superconducting metals. His work found wide application in science ranging from cosmology to the study of subatomic particles. Research on superfluid helium-3 also “may lead to a better understanding of the ways in which turbulence arises—one of the last unsolved problems of classical physics,” said the Swedish Academy.

Michael Woods Prize for Physiology or Medicine The 2003 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to two pioneers of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a computerized scanning technology that produces images of internal body structures, especially those comprising soft tissues. The recipients were Paul Lauterbur of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Sir Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham, Eng. “A great advantage with MRI is that it is harmless according to all present knowledge,” stated the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which awarded the prize. Unlike X-ray and computed tomography (CT) examinations, MRI avoided the use of potentially harmful ionizing radiation; rather, it produced its images with magnetic fields and radio waves. MRI scans spared patients not only many X-ray examinations but also surgical procedures and invasive tests formerly needed to diagnose diseases and follow up after treatments. More than 60 million MRI procedures were performed in 2002 alone, according to the Nobel Assembly. Lauterbur, born May 6, 1929, in Sidney, Ohio, earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1962.

He served as a professor at the University of New York at Stony Brook from 1969 to 1985, when he accepted the position of professor at Urbana-Champaign and director of its Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Laboratory. Mansfield was born Oct. 9, 1933, in London and received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of London in 1962. Following two years as a research associate in the U.S., he joined the faculty of the University of Nottingham, where he remained for essentially his entire career and became professor in 1979. Mansfield was knighted in 1993. When Lauterbur and Mansfield undertook their work in the early 1970s, the technology underpinning MRI was a laboratory research tool. Called nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, it involves putting a sample to be analyzed in a strong magnetic field and then irradiating it with weak radio waves at the appropriate frequency. In the presence of the magnetic field, the nuclei of certain atoms—for example, ordinary hydrogen—absorb the radio energy; i.e., they show resonance at that particular frequency.

Because the resonance frequency depends on the kind of nuclei and is influenced by the presence of nearby atoms, absorption measurements (absorption signal spectra) can provide information about the molecular structure of various solids and liquids. When the nuclei return to their previous energy levels, they emit energy, which carries additional information. NMR spectroscopy has remained a key tool in chemical analysis. When studying molecules with NMR, chemists always had tried to maintain a steady magnetic field, because variations made the absorption signals fuzzy. Lauterbur realized that if the magnetic field was deliberately made nonuniform, information contained in the signal distortions could be used to create two-dimensional images of a sample’s internal structure. While at Stony Brook, he worked evenings developing his idea, using an NMR unit borrowed from campus chemists. MRI imaging succeeds because the human body is about two thirds water, whose molecules are made of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. There are differences in the amount of water present in different organs and tissues. In addition, the amount of water often changes when body structures become injured or diseased; those variations show up in MRI images.

When the body is exposed to MRI’s magnetic field and its pulses of radio waves, the nucleus of each hydrogen atom in water absorbs energy; it then emits the energy in the form of radio waves, or resonance signals, as it returns to its previous energy level. Electronic devices detect the myriad resonance signals from all the hydrogen nuclei in the tissue being examined, and computer processing builds cross-sectional images of internal body structures, based on differences in water content and movements of water molecules. Computer processing also can stack the cross sections in sequence to create three-dimensional, solid images. Mansfield’s research helped transform Lauterbur’s discoveries into a practical technology with wide uses in everyday medicine. He developed a way of using the nonuniformities, or gradients, introduced in the magnetic field to identify differences in the resonance signals more precisely. In addition, he developed new mathematical methods for quickly analyzing information in the signal and showed how technical changes in MRI could lead to extremely rapid imaging. (Part of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded for advances in superconductivity with application to MRI.

See Prize for Physics.) More about Nobel Prizes: Year In Review 2003 6 References found in Britannica Articles Assorted References Alumnus J.M. Coetzee awarded 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature | UT News | The University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin Alumnus J.M. Coetzee awarded 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature Oct. 2, 2003 Reddit AUSTIN, Texas—J.M. Coetzee, author of “Waiting for the Barbarians” and “Life and Times of Michael K,” was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature today. Coetzee, who received his Ph.D. in English in 1969 from The University of Texas at Austin, sets most of his literary work in his native South Africa. The Swedish Academy in Stockholm described his books as being “characterized by their well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance. But at the same time he is a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilization.” He was recognized in 2001 by the university’s Graduate School with the Outstanding Alumnus Award.

“Both the state of Texas and The University of Texas were welcoming and generous to me from the moment I arrived there in 1965,” Coetzee said in the November/December 2001 issue of The Alcalde magazine. “I learned a great deal during my time as a student, as well as during my two subsequent academic visits. It is a source of much satisfaction to me to have kept up the connection with UT to the present day.” Dr. Tom Cable, of the Department of English, was a fellow graduate student with Coetzee at the university. “He was always very smart and an excellent writer, even as a grad student,” Cable said. “I’m probably the first person to have taught his work in a classroom. In 1967 or ’68 he wrote a letter to The Daily Texan about the Vietnam War—it was so subtly ironic I thought he was worth teaching even then.” Coetzee returned to the university in 1995 as a visiting professor and later participated in literary readings as well. “A number of his students have gone on to have a great deal of success,” said James Magnuson, director of the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the university.

“He was very generous with all his students, very precise and thorough in his comments. The students were in awe of him—as, frankly, was I. He is a person of great integrity, someone you know will always come through on his promises.” Coetzee was the first writer to win the prestigious Booker Prize twice, first for “Life and Times of Michael K” in 1983 and again in 1999 for “Disgrace.” His other novels include “The Master of Petersburg,” “Age of Iron” and “Foe.” “There is a great wealth of variety on Coetzee’s works,” according to the Swedish Academy. “No two books ever follow the same recipe. Extensive reading reveals a recurring pattern, the downward spiraling journeys he considers necessary for the salvation of his characters. His protagonists are overwhelmed by the urge to sink but paradoxically derive strength from being stripped of all external dignity.” “In the mid-1960s when we were studying Old English grammar with Ruth Lehmann and theoretical phonology with Archibald Hill, I think we believed that these obscure subjects might somehow connect to more timely events,” Cable said. “Coetzee has always been brilliant at making connections.

It’s not explicit, but his graduate linguistic studies are clearly a part of his intellectual background.” In addition to novels, Coetzee has written two autobiographical books, “Boyhood” and “Youth,” and several collections of essays. His most recent work is this year’s “Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons.” For more information contact: Robin Gerrow , College of Liberal Arts, 512-232-2145. John Maxwell Coetzee, Nobel Prize in Literature, 2003 - Genealogy Genealogy Join the world's largest family tree Gender Share your family tree and photos with the people you know and love Build your family tree online Share photos and videos John Maxwell Coetzee, Nobel Prize in Literature, 2003 Current Location:: Mowbray, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa Immediate Family: Ex-husband of <private> Coetzee (Jubber) Partner of <private> Driver Author and academic from South Africa Managed by: Feb 9 1940 - Capetown. South Africa.

Parents: Zacharias Coetzee, Vera Coetzee (born Wehmeyer) Wife: Philippa Jubber Coetzee (born Unlinked) Children: Zacharias Coetzee, Vera Coetzee (born Wehmeyer) Wife: Philippa Jubber Coetzee (born Unlinked) Children: brother About J.M. Coetzee John Maxwell Coetzee (born 9 February 1940) is an author and academic from South Africa. He is now an Australian citizen and lives in Adelaide, South Australia. A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee has won the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, "who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider". Early life and education Coetzee was born in Cape Town, Cape Province, Union of South Africa, on 9 February 1940 to parents of Afrikaner descent. His father was an occasional lawyer, government employee and sheep farmer, and his mother a schoolteacher. The family spoke English at home, but Coetzee spoke Afrikaans with other relatives.

The family were descended from early Dutch immigrants dating to the 17th century, although his maternal grand-grandfather - Baltazar Dubiel - was Polish. Coetzee spent most of his early life in Cape Town and in Worcester in Cape Province (modern-day Western Cape) as recounted in his fictionalized memoir, Boyhood (1997). The family moved to Worcester when Coetzee was eight after his father lost his government job due to disagreements over the state's apartheid policy. Coetzee attended St. Joseph's College, a Catholic school in the Cape Town suburb of Rondebosch, and later studied mathematics and English at the University of Cape Town, receiving his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in English in 1960 and his Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Mathematics in 1961. Coetzee married Philippa Jubber in 1963 and divorced in 1980. He had a daughter, Gisela (born 1968), and a son, Nicolas (born 1966), from the marriage. Nicolas died in 1989 at the age of 23 in an accident.

Academic and literary career Coetzee relocated to the United Kingdom in 1962, where he worked as a computer programmer, staying until 1965. He worked for IBM in London. In 1963, while working in the UK, he was awarded a Master of Arts degree from the University of Cape Town for a dissertation on the novels of Ford Madox Ford. His experiences in England were later recounted in Youth (2002), his second volume of fictionalized memoirs. Coetzee went to the University of Texas at Austin, in the United States, on the Fulbright Program in 1965. He received a PhD in linguistics there in 1969. His PhD thesis was on computer stylistic analysis of the works of Samuel Beckett. In 1968, he began teaching English literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo where he stayed until 1971. It was at Buffalo that he started his first novel, Dusklands. In 1971, Coetzee sought permanent residence in the United States, but it was denied due to his involvement in anti-Vietnam-War protests.

In March 1970, Coetzee had been one of 45 faculty members who occupied the university's Hayes Hall and were subsequently arrested for criminal trespass. He then returned to South Africa to teach English literature at the University of Cape Town. He was promoted to Professor of General Literature in 1983 and was Distinguished Professor of Literature between 1999 and 2001. Upon retiring in 2002, Coetzee relocated to Adelaide, Australia, where he was made an honorary research fellow at the English Department of the University of Adelaide, where his partner, Dorothy Driver, is a fellow academic. He served as professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago until 2003. In addition to his novels, he has published critical works and translations from Dutch and Afrikaans. On 6 March 2006, Coetzee became an Australian citizen. In June 2011 he gave a reading from his new book at the University of York, UK, though no title or release date has been made available.

Personality and reputation Coetzee is known as reclusive and eschews publicity to such an extent that he did not collect either of his two Booker Prizes in person. Author Rian Malan has said that: Coetzee is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word. As a result of his reclusive nature, signed copies of Coetzee's fiction are highly sought after. Recognising this, he was a key figure in the establishment of Oak Tree Press's First Chapter Series, a series of limited edition signed works by literary greats to raise money for the child victims and orphans of the African HIV/AIDS crisis. Achievements and awards Coetzee has gained many awards throughout his career, although he has a reputation for avoiding award ceremonies.

His novel Waiting for the Barbarians was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and he is three-times winner of the CNA Prize. Age of Iron was awarded the Sunday Express Book of the Year award, and The Master of Petersburg was awarded the Irish Times International Fiction Prize in 1995. He has also won the French Prix Femina Étranger, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and the 1987 Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. He was the first author to be awarded the Booker Prize twice: first for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and again for Disgrace in 1999. Only one author has matched this since – Peter Carey, an Australian. Coetzee was named on the longlist for the 2009 prize for Summertime and was an early favourite to win. Coetzee subsequently made the shortlist, but lost out to bookmakers' favourite and eventual winner Hilary Mantel. Coetzee was also longlisted in 2003 for Elizabeth Costello and in 2005 for Slow Man.

On 2 October 2003 it was announced that he was to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the fifth African writer to be so honoured, and the second South African after Nadine Gordimer. When awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy stated that Coetzee "in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider". The press release for the award also cited his "well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance," while focusing on the moral nature of his work. The prize ceremony was held in Stockholm on 10 December 2003. Coetzee was awarded the Order of Mapungubwe (gold class) by the South African government on 27 September 2005 for his "exceptional contribution in the field of literature and for putting South Africa on the world stage." He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Adelaide, La Trobe University, the University of Natal, the University of Oxford, Rhodes University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Strathclyde and the University of Technology, Sydney.

Politics Political orientation Writing about his past in the third person, Coetzee states in Doubling the Point that: Politically, the raznochinets can go either way. But during his student years he, this person, this subject, my subject, steers clear of the right. As a child in Worcester he has seen enough of the Afrikaner right, enough of its rant, to last him a lifetime. In fact, even before Worcester he has perhaps seen more of cruelty and violence than should have been allowed to a child. So as a student he moves on the fringes of the left without being part of the left. Sympathetic to the human concerns of the left, he is alienated, when the crunch comes, by its language – by all political language, in fact. Asked about the latter part of this quote in an interview, Coetzee said: There is no longer a left worth speaking of, and a language of the left. The language of politics, with its new economistic bent, is even more repellent than it was fifteen years ago.

Views on South Africa Along with André Brink and Breyten Breytenbach, Coetzee was, according to Fred Pfeil, at "the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement within Afrikaner literature and letters". On accepting the Jerusalem Prize in 1987, Coetzee spoke of the limitations of art in South African society, whose structures had resulted in "deformed and stunted relations between human beings" and "a deformed and stunted inner life". He went on to say that "South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less than fully human literature. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from prison". He called on the South African government to abandon its apartheid policy. Scholar Isidore Diala states that J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and André Brink are "three of South Africa's most distinguished white writers, all with definite anti-apartheid commitment". It has been argued that Coetzee's 1999 novel Disgrace allegorises South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Asked about his views on the TRC, Coetzee has stated: "In a state with no official religion, the TRC was somewhat anomalous: a court of a certain kind based to a large degree on Christian teaching and on a strand of Christian teaching accepted in their hearts by only a tiny proportion of the citizenry. Only the future will tell what the TRC managed to achieve". Following his Australian citizenship ceremony, Coetzee said that "I did not so much leave South Africa, a country with which I retain strong emotional ties, but come to Australia. I came because from the time of my first visit in 1991, I 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 that I now have the honour of calling my home." When he initially moved to Australia, he had cited the South African government's lax attitude to crime in that country as a reason for the move, leading to a spat with Thabo Mbeki, who, speaking of Coetzee's novel Disgrace stated that "South Africa is not only a place of rape".

In 1999, the African National Congress submission to an investigation into racism in the media by the South African Human Rights Commission named Disgrace as a novel exploiting racist stereotypes. However, when Coetzee won his Nobel Prize, Mbeki congratulated him "on behalf of the South African nation and indeed the continent of Africa". Criticism of anti-terrorism laws In 2005, Coetzee criticised contemporary anti-terrorism laws as resembling those employed by the apartheid regime in South Africa: "I used to think that the people who created [South Africa's] laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers ahead of their time". The main character in Coetzee's 2007 Diary of a Bad Year, which has been described as blending "memoir with fiction, academic criticism with novelistic narration" and refusing "to recognize the border that has traditionally separated political theory from fictional narrative", shares similar concerns about the policies of John Howard and George W. Bush. Animal rights In recent years, Coetzee has become a vocal critic of animal cruelty and advocate for the animal rights movement.

In a speech given on his behalf by Hugo Weaving in Sydney on 22 February 2007, Coetzee railed against the modern animal husbandry industry. The speech was for Voiceless, an Australian non-profit animal protection organization. Coetzee's fiction has similarly engaged with the problems of animal cruelty and animal welfare, in particular his books Disgrace, The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello. He is vegetarian. JM Coetzee wins Nobel Prize JM Coetzee wins Nobel Prize JM Coetzee wins Nobel Prize 03 Oct 2003 Tweet on Twitter 3 October 2003 Writer JM Coetzee has won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2003, becoming the second South African, after Nadine Gordimer, to scoop literature’s most prestigious prize. The Swedish Academy, announcing their decision, noted the “capacity for empathy that has enabled Coetzee time and again to creep beneath the skin of the alien and the abhorrent”. Coetzee made his debut as a writer of fiction in 1974, but his international breakthrough came in 1980 with the novel Waiting for the Barbarians.

He was awarded the Booker Prize in 1984 for Life and Times of Michael K, and in 1999 became the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, for Disgrace, in which the plot, as in In the Heart of the Country (1977), takes place mainly on a remote South African farm. “A fundamental theme in Coetzee’s novels involves the values and conduct resulting from South Africa’s apartheid system, which, in his view, could arise anywhere”, the Swedish Academy says in its biography of Coetzee . Born in Cape Town in 1940, John Maxwell Coetzee moved to England in the 1960s before going on to study and teach literature in the United States until 1983. In 1984 he became Professor of English Literature at the University of Cape Town. In 2002 he moved to Australia, where he is attached to the University of Adelaide – although he is currently teaching for a year at the University of Chicago in the US.

The Swedish Academy, on its website , summarises Coetzee’s literary career and achievements as follows: “JM Coetzee’s novels are characterised by their well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance. But at the same time he is a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of Western civilisation. “His intellectual honesty erodes all basis of consolation and distances itself from the tawdry drama of remorse and confession. Even when his own convictions emerge to view, as in his defence of the rights of animals, he elucidates the premises on which they are based rather than he argues for them. “Coetzee’s interest is directed mainly at situations where the distinction between right and wrong, while crystal clear, can be seen to serve no end. Like the man in the famous Magritte painting who is studying his neck in a mirror, at the decisive moment Coetzee’s characters stand behind themselves, motionless, incapable of taking part in their own actions. “But passivity is not merely the dark haze that devours personality, it is also the last resort open to human beings as they defy an oppressive order by rendering themselves inaccessible to its intentions.

It is in exploring weakness and defeat that Coetzee captures the divine spark in man. “His earliest novel, Dusklands, was the first example of the capacity for empathy that has enabled Coetzee time and again to creep beneath the skin of the alien and the abhorrent. A man working for the American administration during the Vietnam war dreams of devising an unbeatable system of psychological warfare, while at the same time his private life disintegrates around him. “His reflections are juxtaposed with a report on an expedition to explore the country of the native Africans, which purports to have been written by one of the 18th-century Boer pioneers. Two forms of misanthropy, one of them intellectual and megalomaniac, the other vital and barbaric, reflect each other. “One element in his next novel, In the Heart of the Country, is the portrayal of psychosis. A careworn spinster living with her father observes with distaste his love affair with a young coloured woman. She has fantasies of murdering both of them, but everything seems to indicate that she decides rather to immure herself in a perverse pact with the house servant.

“The actual sequence of events cannot be determined, as the reader’s only sources are her notes, where lies and truths, crudeness and refinement alternate capriciously line by line. The high-flown Edwardian literary style of the woman’s monologue harmonises strangely with the surrounding African landscape. “Waiting for the Barbarians is a political thriller in the tradition of Joseph Conrad, in which the idealist’s naivety opens the gates to horror. The playful metanovel Foe spins a yarn about the incompatibility and inseparability of literature and life, told by a woman who yearns to be part of a major narrative when in reality only one of minor importance is offered. “With Life and Times of Michael K, which has its roots in Defoe as well as in Kafka and Beckett, the impression that Coetzee is a writer of solitude becomes clearer. The novel deals with the flight of an insignificant citizen from growing disorder and impending war to a state of indifference to all needs and speechlessness that negates the logic of power. “The Master of Petersburg is a paraphrase of Dostoevsky’s life and fictional world.

To die in one’s heart away from the world, the temptation that Coetzee’s imagined characters face, turns out to be the principle of the unconscionable liberty of terrorism. Here, the writer’s struggle with the problem of evil is tinged with demonology, an element that recurs in his most recently published work, Elizabeth Costello. “In Disgrace, Coetzee involves us in the struggle of a discredited university teacher to defend his own and his daughter’s honour in the new circumstances that have arisen in South Africa after the collapse of white supremacy. The novel deals with a question that is central to his works: Is it possible to evade history? “His autobiographical Boyhood circles mainly around his father’s humiliation and the psychological cleavage it has caused the son, but the book also conveys a magic impression of life in the old-fashioned South African countryside with its eternal conflicts between the Boers and the English and between white and black. “In its sequel, Youth, the writer dissects himself as a young man with a cruelty that is oddly consoling for anyone able to identify with him. “There is a great wealth of variety in Coetzee’s works. No two books ever follow the same recipe.

Extensive reading reveals a recurring pattern, the downward spiralling journeys he considers necessary for the salvation of his characters. His protagonists are overwhelmed by the urge to sink, but paradoxically derive strength from being stripped of all external dignity.”

Question: Who, before being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2003, was the first author to be awarded the Booker Prize twice?
Answer: J M Coetzee