The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature Anj. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in LiteratureIn 1997, the Nobel Prize winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton University to lecture on the moral status of animals, read a work of fiction about an eminent novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture on the moral status of animals at an American college. Coetzee's lectures were published in 1999 as The Lives of Animals, and reappeared in 2003 as part of his novel Elizabeth Costello; and both lectures and novel have attracted the