South African author JM Coetzee addresses the audience after receiving an honorary doctorate from Wits University in 2012. A fake account on X claimed Coetzee was dead. Picture: Mary-Ann Palmer/Getty Images
Celebrated author and Nobel laureate Prof John Maxwell Coetzee is not dead.
This is after a tweet from an Australian publisher’s fake account purported the passing of the novelist.
“A fake Text Publishing account had been created under @TextPublishAU, posting false news, most notably the death of Text author J.M. Coetzee,” read the brief statement from the real account on X.
The salacious post from the fake account, which has now been removed, sent shock waves in the literary world with the declaration of Coetzee’s alleged demise.
“This is completely untrue, as he is well and in fact emailed us about his own purported death,” averred Text Publishing.
In another post, the Melbourne-based independent publisher cautioned its followers to alert them about any nefarious accounts that claim to be them.
“Please report any such accounts, or check back here for verified news. Our other social media accounts include text_publishing on Instagram, textpublishing on Facebook, and textpublishing on TikTok.”
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A recipient of South Africa’s highest civilian honour awarded by the President, The Order of Mapungubwe in Gold, Coetzee is a revered writer born in Cape Town in 1940.
His fiction debut was Dusklands (1974), about a Vietnam War-era American civil servant who dreams of evolving an unbeatable system of psychological warfare, although his own life is disintegrating.
This was followed in 1977 by Heart of the Country.
Both these novels elicited critical praise, but it was not until 1980 that Coetzee’s first major international breakthrough came with his novel Waiting for the Barbarians.
The novel is a story set in an outpost of an unnamed country ruled by a cruel regime, which was widely assumed to be a metaphor for South Africa (in 2005 the book was turned into a full-length opera with music by composer Philip Glass).
His next novel, The Life and Times of Michael K (1983), won the prestigious Booker Prize.
The book chronicled the struggles of a mentally retarded gardener (living in Cape Town on the brink of racial war) in trying to get his dying mother back to the farm where she was raised.
The founder and Executive Director of the South African Literary Awards (Sala) Morakabe Raks Seakhoa described Coetzee as a great baobab tree.
“His wit, dedication to the craft of literary excellence, but most of all, his abiding knack to teaching, especially to the young and aspirant writers,” Seakhoa told The Citizen.
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The celebration of South African writers, translators and other literary practitioners across 16 categories took place at the Ditsong Museum of Cultural History Museum in Pretoria.
This year’s Sala coincided with the 12th Africa Century International African Writers Conference, which celebrates the 33rd International African Writers’ Day and 30 years of South Africa’s democracy.
In 1991, the Conference of African Ministers of Education and Culture in Cotonou, Benin, voted to designate November 7th as International African Writers’ Day, which is currently observed across the continent.
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