Nadine Gordimer (1923 - 2014) was a South African novelist and short-story writer whose work traced the moral and personal consequences of apartheid. [1] She won the Booker Prize in 1974 for The Conservationist and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, the first South African to receive it. [2] Several of her books were banned under the apartheid government, and she was active in the anti-apartheid movement and later in campaigns against HIV/AIDS.
Early life
Gordimer was born on 20 November 1923 in Springs, a gold-mining town east of Johannesburg, to Jewish immigrant parents: her father a watchmaker from Lithuania, her mother from London. [1] A heart complaint diagnosed in childhood led her mother to withdraw her from school for extended periods, and she read widely and began writing early, publishing her first story in a Johannesburg magazine at fifteen.
She spent a year at the University of the Witwatersrand without taking a degree, and there mixed for the first time across the colour line in the city's literary and political circles. [3] Her first collection, Face to Face, appeared in 1949, and her stories were soon published in The New Yorker.
Fiction under apartheid
Her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), drew on her small-town upbringing. Later books examined the intimate effects of a political system: interracial friendship and its impossibility in A World of Strangers, love across the colour bar in Occasion for Loving, and the exhaustion of white liberalism in The Late Bourgeois World. [3]
The Conservationist (1974), the story of a wealthy white industrialist and the unexplained body found on his farm, shared the Booker Prize that year. [4] Burger's Daughter (1979) followed the child of a Communist activist who dies in detention, and July's People (1981) imagined a white family sheltered by their servant during a violent end to white rule. Three of her novels, including these two, were banned by the South African censors, in some cases for years. [1]
Politics
Gordimer's political engagement deepened after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 and the detention of a close friend. She joined the African National Congress while it was still an illegal organisation, hid activists in her home, and testified for the defence in the Delmas treason trial of the 1980s. [1]
She was closely associated with Nelson Mandela, who asked to meet her on his release from prison in 1990, and she was reported to have assisted with the editing of his statement from the dock at the Rivonia Trial. [3] She also campaigned against censorship, refused to allow her work to be used in ways she judged complicit with the state, and in later life devoted attention to HIV/AIDS, editing the anthology Telling Tales to raise funds for treatment programmes.
Nobel Prize and later work
The Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, describing her as, in Alfred Nobel's words, of very great benefit to humanity through her magnificent epic writing. [2] She continued to publish after the end of apartheid, turning to the tensions of the new South Africa in None to Accompany Me, The House Gun, The Pickup, and No Time Like the Present.
She died in Johannesburg on 13 July 2014. [1] Her fifteen novels and more than two hundred stories are read as both literature and as a sustained record of a society under an unjust order, and her insistence that the writer's responsibility lies in truthful observation rather than propaganda has been widely discussed in debates on political fiction. [2]
