J.M. Coetzee has become the first writer to win Britain's top fiction award twice. He first won the prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction 16 years ago for Life & Times of Michael K (Secker & Warburg; Viking in the U.S.). Now he has won a total of £21,000 (about $35,000) for his novel Disgrace, also published by Secker and by Viking in the U.S.
A modest man who dislikes parties, Coetzee was not at the glitzy dinner at London's Guildhall at which the judges' verdict was announced, but he was immediately telephoned by Secker editor Geoff Mulligan, who accepted the prize for him. Coetzee said he was "profoundly aware of the honor you've done me."
Commenting on their choice, the chairman of the judges, Labour politician Gerald Kaufman, called it a beautifully written and constructed book that is also an allegory of what is happening to the human race in a postcolonial world.
Unusually, Kaufman also named the runner up, Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting (Chatto & Windus/Houghton Mifflin). The other shortlisted titles were Michael Frayn's Headlong (Faber/Holt), Andrew O'Hagan's Our Fathers (Faber/Harcourt Brace), Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love (Bloomsbury/Anchor) and Colm Toibin's The Blackwater Lightship (Picador/Scribner). The impact of the prize is reflected in sales. Last year's winner, Ian McEwan's Amsterdam (Jonathan Cape), has sold more than 87,000 copies in hardback and some 205,000 in paperback.
