Brilliant yet aloof, Coetzee at last wins Nobel prize for literature

At last seems to have been the most common reaction yesterday when the South African-born writer J M Coetzee won the Nobel prize for literature for 2003.

Coetzee, 63, whose name had popped up five times before for the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns (£800,000), solidified his reputation as one of the greatest living writers by winning the Swedish Academy's vote. He was cited as a "scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of Western civilisation". The Swedish Academy said Coetzee's novels were characterised by their "well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance".

Coetzee's award compounds the distinction he earned by being the first writer to win the Booker prize twice - most recently in 1999, for Disgrace. He becomes the seventh South African-born person to win a Nobel prize, and the second writer to do so in 12 years, after Nadine Gordimer in 1991.

Last year Coetzee moved to Adelaide in Australia with his partner, the literary critic Dorothy Driver, citing the South African government's lax attitude to crime. This led to a spat with President Thabo Mbeki, who said of Disgrace: "South Africa is not only a place of rape." Disgrace was described as an attack on political correctness, but also dealt with a woman who survived the trauma of rape by marrying the rapist's relative, in so doing saving her farm.

South Africans still very much regarded Coetzee as one of their own, to judge by the thrilled reaction. The prize was hailed across the political and racial spectrum, with even a right-wing Afrikaner organisa-tion lauding him, although he earned his spurs as an anti-apartheid writer.

Mr Mbeki's African National Congress party said, in the words of its spokesman Smuts Ngonyama: "The ANC hopes the recognition given to South African authors will serve as an inspiration to young writers in this country and on the African continent." Salinda Biyana, of the South African embassy in Stockholm, said: "This is a prize for the whole South African nation. We are there, in the centre of the world."

Coetzee burst on to the scene with Waiting for the Barbarians, set in an unknown country where the existing order is about to collapse. He has always denied that this referred to apartheid, and yesterday the Swedish Academy appeared to back him. Its 18-member literary committee said in its citation that, "in his view, apartheid could arise anywhere".

The post-apartheid Disgrace was seen both as a condemnation of the collapse of order in the new South Africa, and an admonishment to whites to adapt to the true realities of the country, where black people are taking back what was their due, sometimes through violence.

Coetzee avoided commenting on the book himself; indeed, his aloofness towards publicity has in itself become controversial. He did not pitch up to collect either of his Booker prizes, and earned himself the label of a recluse in Cape Town, where he lived and taught for 30 years. Yet Coetzee was admired as a spell-binding teacher of English and linguistics, and his classes were always packed.

He was also the subject of scrutiny in literary circles for referring to personal tragedies in his novels. Master of Petersburg, dealing with an episode from Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Possessed, was said to grapple with the suicide of the writer's son in Johannesburg. His wife's death from cancer was said to be reflected in Age of Iron.

Last year he published Youth, about his childhood, much of it spent at an English-language school in Cape Town, where his Afrikaner parents had sent him from the Western Cape wine-farming town Worcester. He was born in 1940, the son of a sheep farmer.