Before he became known as a novelist, J. M. Coetzee worked as a computer programmer in Britain in the early 1960s, helped develop the Atlas 2 supercomputer, and used code to generate experimental poems, some of whose phrases later reappeared in work he published. His early programming life also opens onto larger questions about how writing made on computers should be interpreted, archived, and preserved.

A page of J. M. Coetzee’s computer code poetry, dated May 30, 1965.