J M Coetzee's name is pronounced as: kuut-SEE (different pronunciations can be found, but this is how Coetzee himself pronounces it)

If Hermann Wittenberg, a Cape Town scholar who has collaborated with Coetzee on various projects, offered a confident version of the most common pronunciation of this common Afrikaans surname (think “book” and “idea”), Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English at Oxford, was no less assured in adhering to the version endorsed, in a letter to the BBC, by J. M. (that’s John Maxwell) himself: kuut-SEE.

But the trickiest name is probably that of South African author JM Coetzee. The first syllable is pronounced kuut (uu as in book); debate rages about the pronunciation of the "ee" at the end.