The Culture & Animals Foundation is pleased to announce that J. M. Coetzee, the South African-born novelist, multiple Booker Prize winner, and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature, has been awarded the 2024 Nancy Regan Arts Prize in recognition of his contribution to animal rights.
Throughout his extensive body of work, J. M. Coetzee has presented a nuanced, challenging, and rigorously honest view of human relationships with and attitudes toward animals. In The Lives of Animals, published twenty-five years ago this year, he introduced readers to Elizabeth Costello, an aging novelist and animal advocate who finds it increasingly difficult to summon the willful forgetfulness necessary to negotiate professional and family relationships in a world indifferent to animal suffering.
In Disgrace, also published in 1999, David Lurie, fired from his job at the university, ends up processing the carcasses of dogs euthanized at an animal shelter. Coetzee writes about farming chickens in Boyhood (1997) and industrial chicken farming in Age of Iron (1990). And in “Meat Country,” an essay published in Granta in 1995, he explores the multiple ironies and incongruities of holding true to his vegetarianism in Texas.
“In his writing,” says Martin Rowe, CAF’s Executive Director, “J. M. Coetzee has asked all of us, whether we eat animals or not, to examine our ethical blind spots, and to acknowledge our frailties as embodied creatures alongside those of other animals. Through his character Elizabeth Costello—truculent, exhausted, and unable any longer to tolerate a far-too-cruel world—he raises an uncomfortably accurate mirror for animal advocates to look into.”
Rowe continues: “Since its beginning in 1985, CAF has recognized that our moral obligations to animals can be stirred not only through reasoning but through the arts—seeing ourselves in the voices, characters, and visions presented on stage, within a frame, or on the page. J. M. Coetzee’s work showcases how a rigorous moral sensibility can be allied with a deep investigation of character to exemplify what it entails to care about lives other than our own.”
In addition to being an advisory board member, Coetzee has long had an association with CAF and its co-founders. In receiving the award, he wrote: “Tom Regan’s pioneering work in the 1980s did much to give shape to the animal rights movement. Since his death, and Nancy’s, their work has been ably carried further by the Culture & Animals Foundation. It is an honour to be associated with the names of the Regans.”
On October 17, 2024, CAF conducted a webinar on J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals with Robert McKay, Alexandra Boehm, and Richard Alan Northover. Click here for the transcript, and watch the video below.
About the Nancy Regan Arts Prize
The prize is given to an individual or team who applied that year for a grant from the organization, or who had produced an outstanding body of work in support of animal rights. All genres of art—including performance, dance, music, craft, film, and the visual arts—are open for consideration. The prize is named for CAF co-founder Nancy Regan (1938–2021). It was because of her interest in the arts that CAF supports artists of all kinds in their promotion of animal rights. Previous winners were cartoonist Joan Chan Wing Yan (2021), artist Sue Coe (2022), and photographer Isa Leshko (2023).
About the Culture & Animals Foundation
The Culture & Animals Foundation (CAF) began in 1985 under the auspices of animal rights philosopher Tom Regan (1938–2017) and his wife, Nancy (1938–2021). In the course of its three-decades-long history, CAF has worked with some of the leading lights in animal advocacy and scholarship. Since 2008, CAF has given annual grants in research, creativity, and performance. In 2017, CAF established the Tom Regan Visiting Research Fellowship at NCSU and the annual Tom Regan Memorial Lecture, and in 2021, the Nancy Regan Arts Prize, to honor CAF’s two co-founders.
