Waiting for the Barbarians

For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state. J. M. Coetzee's prize-winning novel is a startling allegory of the war between opressor and opressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency.

J. M. Coetzee was born in Capetown, South Africa, in 1940 and educated in South Africa and the United States as a computer scientist and linguist. His first work of fiction was Dusklands. This was followed by In the Heart of the Country, which won the premier South African literary award, the CNA Prize; Waiting for the Barbarians, which was awarded the CNA Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Life and Times of Michael K, which won the Booker Prize and the Prix Etranger Femina; Foe; Age of Iron; The Master of Petersburg, which won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize; Disgrace, which won the Booker Prize; and Elizabeth Costello. J. M. Coetzee won the Jerusalem Prize in 1987 and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 1998. His other works include translations; linguistic studies; literary criticism, including Stranger Shores; and two volumes of memoir: Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life and Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II. In 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.