Disgrace

J.M. Coetzee became the first author to win the Booker twice with this tale set in post-apartheid South Africa, where a professor’s complacency contributes to his utter downfall.

Refusing to apologise after an impulsive affair with a student, David Lurie, a 52-year-old professor in Cape Town, seeks refuge on his daughter’s farm. Here, a savage and disturbing attack brings into relief the faults in their relationship. Pitching the moral code of political correctness against the values of Romantic poetry, Disgrace examines dichotomies both in personal relationships and in the unaccountability of one culture towards another.

Winner: The Booker Prize 1999
Published by: Secker & Warburg
Publication date: 1 July 1999

J.M. Coetzee

About the Author

J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa. He is a multi-award-winning author, and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.

More about J.M. Coetzee

Disgrace is the best novel Coetzee has written

Elizabeth Lowry, London Review of Books, October 14 1999

Reading Disgrace during #MeToo

Disgrace found a new relevance decades after its publication due to the #MeToo movement.

In a piece for The New Yorker, writer Jia Tolentino explored the parallels between J.M. Coetzee’s book about a professor who has an affair with a student and the case of disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

‘Disgrace is marked…by the sustained juxtaposition of inevitability and unfathomability—it suggests that power exerted without consideration of humanity carries fearsome, unknowable, and often directly retributive costs,’ wrote Tolentino.

Reading J.M Coetzee's Disgrace during the Harvey Weinstein trial, Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker, February 14 2020