'J. M. Coetzee, one of the most important writers alive today, has turned eighty. A valuable book of diverse writings and artwork, assembled by Dorothy Driver, Coetzee’s life-companion of more than forty years, records the significance of this event. The volume presents a homage to a major writer by his friends—friends who have formed close associations with Coetzee over the course of a long life spent in various locations: the South Africa of Coetzee’s birth, first and foremost, but also the Australia to which Coetzee emigrated with Driver in 2002 and the Argentina that played host to several visits between 2014 and 2017. Mention should also be made of Coetzee’s regular extended stays at the University of Chicago between the mid-1990s and 2003. Not only did these stays allow the writer to forge a durable alliance with that institution and its colleagues (two of whom are represented in this volume); they also serve as a reminder of the importance of the academy in Coetzee’s writing as a whole. Several of those contributing to this volume, accordingly, are academics working at a range of institutions across the world. The coming together, indeed, of thirty-seven academic writers and creative artists in an alphabetically arranged compendium of essayistic reflection, stories, poems, and visual composition speaks to the wide-ranging, polyglot influences in which Coetzee’s writing is steeped and on which in so many ways it depends.' (Introduction)
