Borges and Nobel Prize-winner J Coetzee coincide on many points. Both have written literary criticism consistently throughout their careers, and there are similarities in their views on specific writers (e.g. Kafka), philosophers, and works. The two resemble each other in their use of language, their education, family background, and post-colonial agendas. Borges is present at numerous levels in Coetzee’s novels, for example in ’Foe’ (Borges had himself written on ’Robinson Crusoe’), and Borgesian self-masking of the author pervades novels from ’Elizabeth Costello’ (2003) on.