The Prado Museum will host Nobel laureate JM Coetzee as the first author of the "Writing the Prado" program

John Maxwell Coetzee, Nobel Prize for Literature (2003), has been selected as the first author to participate in the “Writing the Prado” program, a joint initiative with the Loewe Foundation that invites internationally renowned writers to engage literarily with the Museum’s collections.

As inaugural Fellow, the South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee will spend three weeks residing in Madrid (from late June to mid-July), making the Museum his center of activity and also of contemplation. He will write a story related to his time at the Prado, the first of a story collection that the Museum will dedicate to exploring the potential for creative expression at the crossroads of fiction and the visual arts. During his stay, the Nobel Laureate will hold a public conversation at the Prado with his Spanish translator, the philosopher and writer Mariana Dimópulos.

JM Coetzee, born in South Africa in 1940, has published nineteen works of fiction, as well as literary criticism and translations. In addition to the Nobel Prize for Literature (2003), he was twice awarded the Booker Prize. He lives in Adelaide, South Australia, where he is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide. He’s also had visiting appointments over a long academic career, at universities such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford.