In 1991, Nadine Gordimer, a South African novelist, "who through her magnificent epic writing has - in the words of Alfred Nobel - been of very great benefit to humanity".

Coetzee's winning of the prize yesterday, though well received across the world, also jolted some literary pundits who thought that Nigeria's Chinua Achebe, a Syrian poet, and an Australian, would bag this year's prize.

Some Nigerians, who reacted to the announcement, expressed happiness at the award but wondered why Achebe was not considered.

A 63-year-old white South African raised in an English-speaking home in spite of an Afrikaan's background, Coetzee's style has drawn comparison with Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett.

Born in Cape Town, the novelist has also reworked classics such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Dostoyevsky in The Master of Petersburg.

The Swedish Academy, announcing the prize, said Coetzee was "ruthless in his criticisms of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of Western civilisation."

He is regarded as a politically-engaged author who also "writes prose at a higher level than most novelists writing in English", according to Thomas Jones, an editor of the London Review of Books.

He started writing fiction in 1974. His international breakthrough came in 1980 with the novel Waiting for the Barbarians, and he was awarded the Booker Prize in the United Kingdom for Life and Times of Michael K.

After 'updating' Robinson Crusoe in the novel Foe, 1986, Coetzee returned to South Africa with Age of Iron, 1990.

In 1999, Coetzee became the first author to be twice awarded the Booker Prize, for his novel Disgrace, in which the plot, as in In the Heart of the Country, 1977, mainly takes place on a remote farm in South Africa.

A fundamental theme in Coetzee's novels involves the values and conduct resulting from South Africa's apartheid system, which, in his view, could arise anywhere.

The Swedish Academy said Coetzee's novels are also characterised by their "well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance."

The prize includes a cheque for $1.3 million (N196 million), but it can also bestow the added advantage of increased sales, celebrity and admiration.

Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Academy, said that the decision was an easy one.

"We were very much convinced of the lasting value of his contribution to literature. I am not speaking of the number of books, but the variety, and the very high average quality," he said.

"I think he is a writer ... that will continue to be discussed and analysed and we think he should belong to our literary heritage."

Coetzee, pronounced kut-SEE'-uh, is one of the world's most respected writers, author of eight novels and numerous essays and manifestos covering everything from rugby to censorship.

"There is a great wealth of variety in Coetzee's works," the academy citation said.

"No two books ever follow the same recipe. Extensive reading reveals a recurring pattern, the downward-spiralling journeys he considers necessary for the salvation of his characters."

Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello novel came out this week. It is the story of a famous Australian author who finds herself increasingly weary of public life and drawn instead toward philosophical contemplation.

The Nobel prize winner himself is a solitary figure, a quiet, soft-eyed man who rarely communicates with the media, and prefers doing so by e-mail, and declined even to show up to collect his Booker prizes.

Coetzee is a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide.

In a 1990 interview with The Associated Press, he sat on the stairs in the lobby of a downtown Manhattan hotel, leaning in carefully when asked a question and waiting several seconds to respond, in full, well-constructed sentences.

"I am not a herald of community or anything else. I am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light," he said when he won the second Booker.

His books are usually brief - under 300 pages - and concentrated, focusing on the personal consequences of apartheid, the system of racial separation that brutalised South Africa's black majority.

In Life and Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians and others, he writes of men and women doing their best to duck under history or simply float above it.

"Our history is such that all of a sudden ordinary people are confronted with major decisions in a way that ordinary people are usually not faced by," he told AP in 1990. "I think South Africa in the past 40 years has been a place where people have been faced with really huge, moral debts."

The son of a sheep farmer, Coetzee, born in 1940, left South Africa for a decade after the Sharpeville shootings of 1960, when police fired on demonstrators and 70 people were killed.

He worked briefly in England as a programmer for IBM and in 1969 he received a Ph.D from the University of Texas for computer-generated language.

Coetzee manages to transmute political concerns into imaginative landscapes.

His South Africa becomes a nightmarish out-of-time dystopia, yet retains its social reality. He is critically revered (though some found his memoir, Boyhood, too emotionally disengaged), especially for Life and Times of Michael K. Disgrace, an unflinching look at the new social order, heralded a sparser, simpler style. Elizabeth Costello considers literary celebrity and purpose through the prism of a female fiction writer's consciousness. In the Heart of the Country is said to read like a female Beckett monologue.

Other books by Coetzee include Dusklands, 1974, The Master of Petersburg, 1994, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters, 1988, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, 1992, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, 1996.

His memoir, Boyhood, which pays homage to Tolstoy in its title, blurs the lines between fiction and fact and highlights both the power and frailty of memory.

The memoir is told in the third person, providing a level of ironic distance that is characteristic of his writing but which does not prevent the reader from experiencing the often-painful humanity of his characters. The content of Boyhood contributes to the formal concerns through stories of the artificial, even absurd and seemingly arbitrary choices that the young boy must make.

Each of these situations is rendered with humour and poignancy, demonstrating the deep prejudices and divisiveness that such oppositions create. In many ways this memoir, explores the writer as a boy developing his strategies for negotiating a world of oppositions, how to resist such divisions.

While this is interesting for literary critics considering the boundaries between autobiography and fiction, it also light-lights a world, which is particularly divisive in the South Africa in which Coetzee grew up.

His essays against censorship confronts issues that reveal how even those not part of an official censorship system, can be embroiled in certain silencing structures....

The essays range over places and figures such as the contemporary Soviet Union, Erasmus, Osip Mandelstam, Solzhenitsyn, Zbigniew Herbert, Lady Chatterleys Lover, Andre Brink, Breytan Breytanbach, Apartheid and Censorship in South Africa.

His earliest novel, Dusklands, was the first example of the capacity for empathy that enabled Coetzee time and again to creep beneath the skin of the alien and the abhorrent.

One element in his next novel, In the Heart of the Country, is the portrayal of psychosis.

Waiting for the Barbarians is a political thriller in the tradition of Joseph Conrad, in which the idealist's naivety opens the gates to horror.

The playful meta-novel Foe spins a yarn about the incompatibility and inseparability of literature and life, told by a woman who yearns to be part of a major narrative when in reality only one of minor importance is offered.

Life and Times of Michael K deals with the flight of an insignificant citizen from growing disorder and impending war to a state of indifference to all needs and speechlessness that negates the logic of power; while the The Master of Petersburg is a paraphrase of Dostoevsky's life and fictional world.

To die in one's heart away from the world, the temptation that Coetzee's imagined characters face, turns out to be the principle of the unconscionable liberty of terrorism. Here, the writer's struggle with the problem of evil is tinged with demonology, an element that recurs in his most recently published work, Elizabeth Costello.