Coetzee is one of those writers who rarely talk about their work, and even less often about themselves. Scenes from Provincial Life, a surprising autobiographical novel, is an exception. Here the Nobel laureate is extremely, sometimes shockingly, frank. Turning to the theme of childhood, so vividly heard in The Childhood of Jesus, he will talk about the painful, suffocating love of his mother, about the hobbies and mistakes that haunted him for years, and about the path that he had to go through to finally begin to write. We will see Coetzee up close like we have never seen before. And a completely different person will be revealed to us.