JM Coetzee’s Disgrace has been voted the best novel written between 1980 and 2005 by a panel of 120 literary luminaries who took part in a poll conducted by The Observer newspaper in London.
The exercise sought to find the best work of British fiction where — Ã la the Booker Prize — “British” included the literary creations of Ireland and the Commonwealth. Those parameters meant that contemporary fiction from the English-speaking world as a whole was not eligible.
Nonetheless, Coetzee’s is a towering achievement. The list of his fellow writers — some of whom are listed below — is a who’s who of great novelists. And they nominated not only Disgrace, but three other Coetzee works: Waiting for the Barbarians, Age of Iron and Master of Petersburg.
Disgrace earned Coetzee the distinction of becoming the first writer to win the Booker twice, as well as being part of the oeuvre that won him the Nobel Prize in 2003.
Reporting on the poll, Robert McCrum, books editor of The Observer, noted: “John Coetzee himself is an appealing figure: discreet, professorial, and soft-spoken. Wisely shunning the literary circus, he is our Invisible Man. He lives quietly; he rides his bike; he writes. Slowly, the work accumulates. He is a writer’s writer, but he’s a reader’s writer, too. Which is how we return him to Observer readers, a great contemporary whose work we are lucky enough to find in our own time.”
Other novels in the top ten were: second: Money by Martin Amis; joint third place: Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess, Atonement by Ian McEwan, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie; joint eighth place: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, Amongst Women by John McGahern and That They May Face the Rising Sun by John McGahern.
The 120-strong panel included Monica Ali, Kate Atkinson, JG Ballard, Julian Barnes, Melvyn Bragg, AS Byatt, John Carey, Peter Carey, Justin Cartwright, Margaret Drabble, Geoff Dyer, Brian Friel, Christopher Hampton, David Hare, Joanne Harris, Robert Harris, Ian Jack, Frank Kermode, Hanif Kureishi, Doris Lessing, David Lodge, Ian McEwan, Jan Morris, Andrew Motion, Philip Pullman, Simon Schama, Anita Shreve, Ali Smith, and Zadie Smith.