JM Coetzee’s Summertime Wins Australia’s Christina Stead Prize for Fiction

by Amanda on May 20th, 2010

It gives Random House Struik great pleasure to announce that JM Coetzee is the recipient of Australia’s 2010 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for his autobiographical novel, Summertime. The announcement of this prestigious award was made on Monday, 17 May by New South Wales Premier, Kristina Keneally. The prize comes with a AUS40 000 purse.

The Christina Stead Prize for Fiction is named in honour of the highly acclaimed Australian novelist and short-story writer. The prize may be awarded for either a novel or a collection of stories.

In Summertime, a rich, funny, and deeply affecting autobiographical novel, a young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972–1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was “finding his feet as a writer”.

Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him – a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others.

Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task. It completes the majestic trilogy of fictionalised memoir begun with Boyhood and Youth.

JM Coetzee’s works include Waiting For the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace, and Diary of a Bad Year. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.