John Baker’s Blog

Nobel Prize winner, J.M. Coetzee, gave the National Book Critics Circle a list of five books he believes reviewers should have in their libraries.
The Iliad. - the standard for the narrative of action.
Aristotle, Poetics. - the terms for all later debate on the truth claims of history versus the truth claims of poetry.
Cervantes, Don [...]

Disgrace won the 1999 Booker Prize and I probably read it that year, perhaps in 2000, I don’t remember. It would certainly be among the top three novels to win that prize in the last decade.
He has not taken to Bev Shaw, a dumpy, bustling little woman with black freckles, close-cropped, wiry hair, and no [...]

1. Why do you blog?
It’s useful to have an instant audience for short pieces of writing, and also to have something to motivate you. Although I had no clear intention when I began over three years ago, I soon noticed I was writing pieces in a style geared to the medium and that probably wouldn’t [...]

We were at a reading by JM Coetzee at the University this afternoon.
Coetzee’s early life was in South Africa. In the early sixties he lived in England, working as a computer programmer while doing research for a thesis on the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. Later in that decade he was in Texas studying for [...]