[ HATS off to South African novelist... ]

HATS off to South African novelist JM Coetzee who has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. But will the intensely private author, who didn’t show up on the two occasions he won the Booker Prize, go to Stockholm to receive his prize? “I very much doubt it,” says Mrs Jonty Driver, wife of former Wellington headmaster Jonty Driver, whose sister Dorothy, a professor of English in Cape Town, is Coetzee’s most intimate friend. “But you’ve got to respect his decision.”