I say colleague, but remember, he was the Rawlings Professor of Apolitical Close Reading while I was a junior lecturer on a one-year, non-renewable contract. In corporate terms, this would be the equivalent of the CEO of a multinational corporation being regarded as a colleague of the mould growing on the underside of the cleaner’s bucket. It is impossible to overstate what a gap in status there was between us.

Furthermore, he was a man and I was a very young woman. You might think this is irrelevant, but that would prove how little you know about the generation of academics Coetzee represents.

Coetzee and I interacted face-to-face on three occasions. I should describe them for you. Show, not tell. That’s Memoir Writing 101. Not easy for those of us trained in academic exegesis. We have been schooled to tell, with very little need to show.

The first occasion was at my thesis defence seminar, before I got the junior lectureship.

This is part of how PhDs are awarded at the University of Constantia: your thesis is read by a panel of your peers, before whom you appear in person to defend your work against such questions and comments as they might want to put to you. This is known as your thesis defence.

Mine went by in a blur, but some moments stand out. One is of Prof. Coetzee asking me whether I agreed that feminist literary theory had “run its course.” This was in the middle of my animated discussion with a professor from the African Studies Department about whether the particular strand of Afrofuturistic feminist methodology I had chosen was the correct paradigm to apply to the texts in question.

He also asked whether I was married or intended to have children, without explaining why these points were relevant.

Later I heard that my thesis had been passed—provided I expanded two sections and corrected a few typos—by a majority of five panellists to one. I had no doubt who that one hold-out panellist was. At the time, it didn’t trouble me. John Coetzee’s questions about feminist methodology and my marital status became comic fodder for me to recycle among my friends at the Cap & Gown pub near campus.

Prof. Coetzee was an anachronism. His time was up. He and the generation he represented were history. Coetzee’s failed literary ambitions were an open secret at the university. The unfinished manuscript was a running joke among undergraduates at the University of Constantia, who used to quote bits of its cringeworthy dialogue to each other.

Never did we imagine that he was a whisker away from writing the book that would scoop that year’s major literary awards. He was about to become South Africa’s next Booker Prize winner. First Nadine Gordimer, and now John Coetzee. We would have choked on our beers laughing if anyone had suggested such a thing.