JM Coetzee at Wolfson

Last night, over 400 Wolfson members and friends were treated to a rare public appearance by Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee. For an hour, the audience were spellbound by Coetzee's measured, yet absorbing, reading of extracts from his 2013 book The Childhood of Jesus and from a work in progress.  

Professor Elleke Boehmer, Wolfson Governing Body Fellow and Professor of World Literature in English, opened the event by expressing the College's pleasure at Coetzee's one night only, summer evening visit to Oxford. A commenter on Coetzee's works, Boehmer briefly highlighted some of the overarching themes that appear throughout many of his novels, including the intensive realisation of place and the repercussions of (often accidental) involvement in lives that are not our own.

Coetzee opened his reading by thanking Boehmer for her kind words and the College for the honour of the invitation. He read two sections from The Childhood of Jesus, recounting the story of two recently arrived immigrants (an unrelated man and child) and their search for work and the child's mother. He then read from a work in progress, which consists of letters between himself and Dr Arabella Kurtz, a psychoanalyst, and addresses the relationship between fiction and psychotherapy.

Professor Dame Hermione Lee thanked Coetzee for the fascinating evening, and suggested that his works inspired us to ‘shoulder our burdens and accept our chance to live'.

After the reading, Coetzee spent 45 minutes speaking to and signing the books of the audience members, an opportunity which was greatly appreciated by many of his admirers.   

Photographs by John Cairns