J. M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940 and educated in South Africa and the United States. He has published 16 works of fiction, as well as criticism and translations. Among awards he has won are the Booker Prize (twice) and, in 2003, the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Adelaide, South Australia. He has a strong interest in translation, having worked as a translator himself, and in the importance of dialogue and exchange between writers and critics from across the world, having long undertaken this process of ongoing dialogue. To this end he recently engaged with scholars and writers from Argentina in developing an initiative called the Literatures of the South, which links writers and critics from a number of regions, including South America, Southern Africa, and Australia.