Life and Times of Michael K

On this week’s ABR podcast, critic and essayist James Ley reflects on J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K, forty years after its publication. Coetzee’s fourth and Booker Prize-winning novel was his landmark work, explains Ley. This was despite it receiving criticism for supposedly eliding the political realities of Apartheid South Africa by being set in ‘the realm of allegory’. Listen to James Ley with ‘An obscure prodigy: J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K at forty’, published in the August issue of ABR.