Awards and nominations:
Coetzee has been the recipient of numerous awards throughout his career, although he has a reputation for avoiding award ceremonies.
He was the first writer to be awarded the Booker Prize twice: first for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and again for Disgrace in 1999. Two other authors have since managed this — Peter Carey (in 1988 and 2001) and Hilary Mantel (in 2009 and 2012).
Summertime, named on the 2009 longlist, was an early favourite to win an unprecedented third Booker Prize for Coetzee. It subsequently made the shortlist, but lost out to bookmakers' favourite and eventual winner Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Coetzee was also longlisted in 2003 for Elizabeth Costello and in 2005 for Slow Man.
The Schooldays of Jesus, a follow up to his 2013 novel The Childhood of Jesus was longlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize.
On 2 October 2003, Horace Engdahl, head of the Swedish Academy, announced that Coetzee had been chosen as that year's recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the fourth African writer to be so honoured and the second South African after Nadine Gordimer. When awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy stated that Coetzee "in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider". The press release for the award also cited his "well-crafted composition, pregnant dialogue and analytical brilliance," while focusing on the moral nature of his work. The prize ceremony was held in Stockholm on 10 December 2003.
A three-time winner of the CNA Prize, Waiting for the Barbarians received both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Age of Iron was awarded the Sunday Express Book of the Year award, and The Master of Petersburg was awarded The Irish Times International Fiction Prize in 1995. He has also won the French Prix Femina Étranger, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and the 1987 Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.
Coetzee was awarded the Order of Mapungubwe (gold class) by the South African government on 27 September 2005 for his "exceptional contribution in the field of literature and for putting South Africa on the world stage." He holds honorary doctorates from The American University of Paris, the University of Adelaide, La Trobe University, the University of Natal, the University of Oxford, Rhodes University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Strathclyde, the University of Technology, Sydney, the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and the Universidad Iberoamericana.
In November 2014, Coetzee was honoured with a three-day academic conference entitled "JM Coetzee in the World", held in his adopted city of Adelaide. It was described as "the culmination of an enormous collaborative effort and the first event of its kind in Australia" and "a reflection of the deep esteem in which John Coetzee is held by Australian academia".