 Madam President, Lady, gentlemen and colleagues. From 1962 to 1965 John Maxwell Cuttsie lived in England first in this great metropolis and later out in Surrey. Having just completed his undergraduate honours degrees in English and mathematics at the University of Cape Town, he set sail for Southampton his first trip overseas. He was 21 years old, an aspiring poet, A London he told himself was the city from which he must learn to write. The plan was to get a respectable job by day and write in the free hours. He soon found work as a computer programmer. A programmer was seen the earliest days of computers near Oxford Street. In the evenings and on Saturdays he also researched and wrote an MA thesis on the novels of Ford Maddox Ford. He knew this Bloomsbury neighbourhood. He must have walked by Sears many times on his way to what was then Dylan's Bookstore in Mallard and Gower Streets. He would also have known that he was walking by one of the great publishing houses of the 20th century, favour and favour, building now integral to the Sears campus and adorned with a commemorative plaque in honour of its most famous editorial director, the poet, and one of his earliest literary mentors, T.S. Eliot. All of this is a prelude to the story of the writer that we are honouring today who began making notes for what became his first novel, Dusklands, in the Reading Room of the British Museum, just a stone's throw from here. It's now 50 years since John could see that this island shores for further studies in America, specifically a doctorate at the University of Texas, whereas a full right scholar he read linguistics, literature and Germanic languages and wrote a dissertation on Samuel Beckett's English fiction. In that time he's become one of the world's most distinguished novelists and critical thinkers. All of this has happened whilst also teaching and inspiring generations of students and colleagues from Cape Town to Chicago in his role as Professor of Literature, a position he currently holds at the University of Adelaide in South Australia, where he's lived since 2002. His work has been recognised through numerous other honorary degrees by other eminent universities and he's accumulated literary prizes, one after the other, and national honours from France and the Netherlands, as well as South Africa's highest award, the Order of Wapengubwe Gold. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. Now even without his fiction, a corpus which now includes some 13 novels and for which he's won two Booker Prizes for Life and Times of Michael K in 1983 and for Disgrace in 1999, a Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Pre-Feminate Étranger, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and many more, could see as a scholar would still be acquiring honorary degrees since not only are his novels taught on syllabi all over the world, but so is his criticism. From the essays collected in white writing on colonial South African literature, it's a seminal book that is still unmatched since its publication in 1988, to those on censorship in giving offence, his intellectual autobiography of essays and interviews in doubling the point and the two volumes Stranger Shores and Inner Workings which feature many of the essays he's written as a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. Even this doesn't adequately provide a sense of the range of his work, of the variety and originality, the cross-generic hybrid and difficult to classify works such as the eight lessons of Elizabeth Costello, or the extraordinary polyphonic novel Diary of a Bad Year, or the magnificent memoir trilogy Scenes from Provincial Life, or the translations from Dutch and Afrikaans, or his collaborative ventures or the adaptations of his novels for stage and screen. 20 years ago, when he was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Cape Town, his fellow novelist and colleague, Andre Brink, proclaimed that John Cotsia has changed not only the South African literary landscape, but the shape and horizons of the novel is a genre. The magnetic effect is tangible. There are centres named after him, writes David Atwell. Centres of creative writing, centres for creative and performing arts named after him in places at other ends of the world, Adelaide, Australia and Bogota, Columbia. There's even an asteroid named Dr Cotsia. Years ago in the South African press, Cotsia was variously called the Becket of the Borland, the Kafka of the Karoo, the Faulkner of the Felt. All three accolades are well chosen since they emphasise key writers in his formation and a landscape that has been central to much of his fiction. One could easily enumerate others, Defoe, Dostievsky, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Flauver, Pound and Rilke. But if we were to think of artists with a similar approach to work and style, I would still go elsewhere. Two figures remote from each other in time and vocation for whom he's expressed admiration. In classical music it is of course J.R. Spach. In tennis it is of course Roger Federer. Both keep standing the test of time, demonstrating the kind of genius that combines industry, improvisation, intelligence and intuition, qualities that have made them classic players in their respective fields and qualities you will find when you read the work of J.M. Cotsia. Madam President, it is my privilege now to present Professor John Maxwell Cotsia for the award of Doctor of Literature and to invite him to address this assembly. Thank you first, Kai, for your kind words. It is an honour for me and a pleasure to be asked to say a few words to the new graduates of the School of Oriental and African Studies. I was never a student at SOAS, but my brother David was. David is alas no longer with us. But I can imagine what he would have said about the present occasion. I had to attend lectures and sit exams to get my degree. While you have to do nothing but rock up for graduation day it is an outrage. For many years I taught at the University of Cape Town where among my colleagues were graduates of SOAS teaching history, anthropology and African studies. Through the dark decades of the 1970s and the 1980s these men and women resisted pressures from left and right to give their teaching and scholarship a more nationalistic slant. They continued to present an intellectually sophisticated account of how we understand ourselves, how we understand our culture, how we understand our history. I was proud to be associated with the example they set of academic responsibility and I'm proud today to be associated with the institution where they were nurtured. Those of you who plan to follow careers in higher education will, I hope, carry the values of SOAS with you into the future. Thank you.