I am going to release you soon from this rope of words. There is no need to be sorry for me. But spare a thought for this man left behind who cannot swim, does not yet know how to fly.

I slept and woke up cold: my belly, my heart, my very bones cold. The door to the balcony was open, the curtains were waving in the wind.

Vercueil stood on the balcony staring out over a sea of rustling leaves. I touched his arm, his high, peaked shoulders, the bony ridge of his spine. Through chattering teeth I spoke: 'What are you looking at?'

He did not answer. I stood closer. A sea of shadows beneath us, and the screen of leaves shifting, rustling, like scales over the darkness.

'Is it time?' I said.

I got back into bed, into the tunnel between the cold sheets. The curtains parted; he came in beside me. For the first time I smelled nothing. He took me in his arms and held me with mighty force, so that the breath went out of me in a rush. From that embrace there was no warmth to be had.

John Michael Coetzee was born in 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa, the son of a lawyer and a teacher. Coetzee grew up in an English-speaking household and attended English-language schools, but he also spoke Afrikaans, developed from the Dutch language and spoken by most whites in South Africa. He spent most of his childhood near the town of Worcester, about 70 miles outside of Cape Town.

Upon completing bachelor's degrees in mathematics and literature at the University of Cape Town, Coetzee moved to London to work as a computer programmer, writing poetry and studying literature in his spare time. In 1965 he came to the United States to pursue a doctorate in literature and linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he wrote his dissertation on Samuel Beckett. Coetzee spent several years teaching in the United States before returning to South Africa in 1971. He served as a professor of literature at the University of Cape Town until he retired in 2002. He is a member of the committee on social thought at the University of Chicago and research fellow at the University of Adelaide.

Coetzee's novels include In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1982), Life amp; Times of Michael K (1983), and Disgrace (1999). He has also published two memoirs about growing up in South Africa during apartheid, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) and Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002). His fiction has won numerous awards, including the Booker Prize (he is the only author to win twice), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. A noted essayist and scholar, Coetzee has also produced translations of works in Afrikaans, Dutch, French, and German.