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Nadine Gordimer (born 20 November 1923) is a South African writer, political activist and winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in literature. Her writing has long dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organization was banned. She has recently been active in HIV/AIDS causes.

Early life

She was born in Springs, Gauteng, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg, the daughter of Isidore and Nan Gordimer. Her parents were both Jewish immigrants, her father a watchmaker from Lithuania near the Latvian border, and her mother from London. Gordimer's early interest in racial and economic inequality in South Africa was shaped in part by her parents. Her father's experience as a Jewish refugee in czarist Russia helped form Gordimer's political identity, but he was neither an activist nor particularly sympathetic toward the experiences of black people under apartheid.

Conversely, Gordimer saw activism by her mother, whose concern about the poverty and discrimination faced by black people in South Africa led her to found a crèche for black children. Gordimer also experienced government repression firsthand, when as a teenager the police raided her family home, confiscating letters and diaries from a servant's room.

Gordimer was educated at a Catholic convent school, but was largely home-bound as a child because of her mother's "strange reasons of her own" (apparently, fears that Gordimer had a weak heart). Home-bound and often isolated, she began writing at an early age, and published her first stories in 1937 at the age of fifteen. Her first published work was a short story for children, "The Quest for Seen Gold," which appeared in the Children's Sunday Express in 1937; "Come Again Tomorrow," another children's story, appeared in Forum around the same time. At the age of 15, she had her first adult fiction published.

Gordimer studied for a year at Witwatersrand University, where she mixed for the first time with fellow professionals across the color bar. She also became involved in the Sophiatown renaissance. She did not complete her degree, but moved to Johannesburg in 1948, where she has lived ever since. While taking classes in Johannesburg, Gordimer continued to write, publishing mostly in local South African magazines. She collected many of these early stories in Face to Face, published in 1949.

In 1951, the New Yorker accepted Gordimer's story "A Watcher of the Dead", beginning a long relationship, and bringing Gordimer's work to a much larger public. Gordimer, who has said she believes the short story is the literary form for our age, has continued to publish short stories in the New Yorker and other prominent literary journals.

Gordimer's first novel, The Lying Days, was published in 1953. In 1954, she married Reinhold Cassirer, a highly respected art dealer who established the South African Sotheby's and later ran his own gallery; their "wonderful marriage" lasted until his death from emphysema in 2001. It was her second marriage and his third. Their son, Hugo, was born in 1955, and is today a filmmaker in New York, with whom Gordimer has collaborated on at least two documentaries. Gordimer also had a daughter during this time.

Political and literary activism

The arrest of her best friend, Bettie du Toit, in 1960 and the Sharpeville massacre spurred Gordimer's entry into the anti-apartheid movement. Thereafter, she quickly became increasingly active in South African politics, and was close friends with Nelson Mandela's defense attorneys (Bram Fischer and George Bizos) during his 1962 trial. When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Gordimer was one of the first people he wanted to see.

During the 1960s and 1970s, she continued to live in Johannesburg, although she occasionally left for short periods of time to teach at several universities in the United States. She had begun to achieve international literary recognition, receiving her first major award in 1961. Throughout this time, Gordimer continued to demand through both her writing and her activism that South Africa re-examine and replace its long held policy of apartheid. During this time, the South African government banned three of her works, along with works by other anti-apartheid writers.

In South Africa, she joined the African National Congress when it was still listed as an illegal organisation by the South African government. While never blindly loyal to any organization, Gordimer saw the ANC as the best hope for reversing South Africa's treatment of black citizens. Rather than simply criticizing the organization for its perceived flaws, she advocated joining it to address them. She hid ANC leaders in her own home to aid their escape from arrest by the government, and she has said that the proudest day of her life was when she testified at the 1986 Delmas treason trial on behalf of 22 South African anti-apartheid activists. (See Simon Nkoli, Mosiuoa Lekota, etc.) Throughout these years she also regularly took part in anti-apartheid demonstrations in South Africa, and traveled internationally speaking out against South African apartheid and discrimination and political repression.

Her works began achieving literary recognition early in her career, with her first international recognition in 1961, followed by numerous literary awards throughout the ensuing decades. Literary recognition for her accomplishments culminated with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, which noted that Gordimer "through her magnificent epic writing has — in the words of Alfred Nobel — been of very great benefit to humanity".

In the post-apartheid 1990s and 21st century, Gordimer has been active in the HIV/AIDS movement, which is a significant public health crisis in South Africa. In 2004, she organized about 20 major writers to contribute short fiction for Telling Tales, a fundraising book for South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, which lobbies for government funding for HIV/AIDS prevention and care. On this matter, she has been critical of the current South African government, noting in 2004 that she "approves" of everything President Mbeki has done except his stance on AIDS.

Gordimer's activism has not been limited to South Africa. Gordimer's resistance to discrimination extends to her even refusing to accept "shortlisting" in 1998 for the Orange Prize, because it is an award that recognizes only women writers. She refused to let her work be aired by the South African Broadcasting Corporation because it was controlled by the apartheid government. While on lecture tours, she has spoken on matters of foreign policy and discrimination beyond South Africa. For instance, in 2005, when Fidel Castro fell ill, Gordimer joined six other Nobel prizewinners in a public letter to the United States warning it not to seek to destabilize Cuba's communist government.

A founding member of the Congress of South African Writers, Gordimer has also been active in South African letters and international literary organizations. She has been Vice President of International PEN, and has served on the steering committee of South Africa's Anti-Censorship Action Group.

Work and themes

Gordimer has achieved lasting international recognition for her works, most of which deal with political issues, as well as the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. Virtually all of Gordimer's works deal with themes of love and politics, particularly concerning race in South Africa. Always questioning power relations and truth, Gordimer tells stories of ordinary people, revealing moral ambiguities and choices. Her characterization is nuanced, revealed more through the choices her characters make than through their claimed identities and beliefs.

Her first published novel, The Lying Days (1953), takes place in Gordimer's home town of Springs, Transvaal, an East Rand mining town near Johannesburg. Arguably a semi-autobiographical work, The Lying Days describes is a bildungsroman, charting the growing political awareness of a young white woman, Helen, toward small-town life and South African racial division.

In her 1963 work, Occasion for Loving, Gordimer puts apartheid and love squarely together. Her protagonist, Ann Davis, is married to Boaz Davis, an ethnomusicologist, but in love with Gideon Shibalo, an artist with several failed relationships. Ann Davis is white, however, and Gideon Shibalo is black, and South Africa's government criminalised such relationships.

Gordimer won the Booker Prize for her 1974 novel, The Conservationist, which explores Zulu culture and the world of a wealthy white industrialist through the eyes of Mehring, the antihero. Per Wästberg described The Conservationist as Gordimer's "densest and most poetical novel". Thematically covering the same ground as Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country (1977), the "conservationist" seeks to conserve nature to preserve the apartheid system, keeping change at bay. When an unidentified corpse is found on his farm, Mehring does the "right thing" by providing it a proper burial; but the dead person haunts the work, a reminder of the bodies on which Mehring's vision would be built.

Gordimer's 1979 novel Burger's Daughter is the story of a woman analyzing her relationship with her father, a martyr to the anti-apartheid movement. The child of two Communist and anti-apartheid revolutionaries, Rosa Burger finds herself drawn into political activism as well. Written in the aftermath of the Soweto uprising, the novel was shortly thereafter banned by the South African government. Gordimer described the novel as a "coded homage" to Bram Fischer, the lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists.

In July's People (1981), Gordimer imagines a bloody South African revolution, in which white people are hunted and murdered after black people begin a revolution against the apartheid government. The work follows Maureen and Bamford Smales, an educated white couple, hiding for their lives with July, their long-time former servant. The novel plays off the various groups of "July's people": his family and his village, as well as the Smales. The story examines how people cope with the terrible choices forced on them by violence, race hatred, and the state.

The House Gun (1998) was Gordimer's second post-apartheid novel. It follows the story of a couple, Claudia and Harald Lingard, dealing with their son Duncan's murder of one of his housemates. The novel treats the rising crime rate in South Africa and the guns that virtually all households have, as well as the legacy of South African apartheid and the couple's concerns about their son's lawyer, who is black. The novel was optioned for film rights to Granada Productions.

Gordimer's award-winning 2002 novel, The Pickup, considers the issues of displacement, alienation, and immigration; class and economic power; religious faith; and the ability for people to see, and love, across these divides. It tells the story of a couple: Julie Summers, a white woman from a financially secure family, and Abdu, an illegal Arab immigrant in South Africa. After Abdu's visa is refused, the couple returns to his homeland, where she is the alien. Her experiences and growth as an alien in another culture form the heart of the work.

Gordimer's recent novel, Get a Life, written in 2005 after the death of her longtime spouse, Reinhold Cassirer, is the story of a man undergoing treatment for a life-threatening disease. While clearly drawn from recent personal life experiences, the novel also continues Gordimer's exploration of political themes. The protagonist is an ecologist, battling installation of a planned nuclear plant. But he is at the same time undergoing radiation therapy for his cancer, causing him personal grief and, ironically, rendering him a nuclear health hazard in his own home. Here, Gordimer again pursues the questions of how to integrate everyday life and poltical activism.

Recent Events

Gordimer was the subject of a 2006 biography by Ronald Suresh Roberts, which she repudiated after its publication.

In October 2006, Gordimer was robbed and assaulted at her home. She was not seriously injured.

Bibliography

Fiction

• The Lying Days (1953)
• A World of Strangers (1958)
• Occasion for Loving (1963)
• The Late Bourgeois World (1966)
• A Guest of Honour (1970)
• The Conservationist (1974) - Joint winner of the Booker prize in 1974
• Burger's Daughter (1979)
• July's People (1982)
• A Sport of Nature (1987)
• My Son's Story (1990)
• None to Accompany Me (1994)
• The House Gun (1998)
• The Pickup (2001)
• Get a Life (2005)
• Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black (2007)

Short story collections

• Face to Face (1949)
• Town and Country Lovers
• The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952)
• Six feet of the Country (1956)
• Not for Publication (1965)
• Livingstone's Companions (1970)
• Selected Stories (1975)
• No Place Like: Selected Stories (1978)
• A Soldier's Embrace (1980)
• Something Out There (1984)
• Correspondence Course and other Stories (1984)
• The Moment Before the Gun Went Off (1988)
• Jump: And Other Stories (1991)
• Why Haven't You Written: Selected Stories 1950-1972 (1992)
• Something for the Time Being 1950-1972 (1992)

• Loot: And Other Stories (2003)

Plays

• The First Circle (1949) pub. in Six One-Act Plays

Essays

• The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (1988)
• The Black Interpreters (1973)
• Writing and Being: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (1995)

Other works

• On the Mines (1973)
• Lifetimes Under Apartheid (1986)
• "Choosing for Justice: Allan Boesak" (1983) (documentary with Hugo Cassirer)
• "Berlin and Johannesburg: The Wall and the Colour Bar" (documentary with Hugo Cassirer)

Adaptations of Gordimer's works

• "The Gordimer Stories" (1981-82) - adaptations of seven Gordimer short stories; she wrote screenplays for four of them

Edited works

• Telling Tales (2004)

Honors

• W. H. Smith Commonwealth Literary Award (England) (1961)
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize (England) (1972)
• Booker Prize for The Conservationist (1974)
• CNA Prize (Central News Agency Literary Award), South Africa (1974, 1975, 1980, 1991)
• Grand Aigle d'Or (France) (1975)
• Orange Prize shortlisting; she rejected
• Scottish Arts Council Neil M. Gunn Fellowship (1981)
• Modern Language Association Award (United States) (1982)
• Bennett Award (United States) (1987)
• Premio Malaparte (Italy) (1985)
• Nelly Sachs Prize (Germany) (1986)
• Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (1988, A Sport of Nature)
• Nobel Prize for Literature (1991)
• Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Best Book from Africa (2002; for The Pickup)
• Booker Prize longlist (2001; for The Pickup)
• Legion of Honour (France) (2007).
• Hon. Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Hon. Member, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
• Fellow, Royal Society of Literature (Britain)
• Patron, Congress of South African Writers
• Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France)
• At least 15 honorary degrees (the first being Doctor Honoris Causa at Leuven University in Belgium)

Further reading

Brief biographies

• Template:Contemporary writers
• LitWeb.net: Nadine Gordimer Biography (2003)
• Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles

Critical studies

• Stephen Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (1986)
• John Cooke, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer
• Andrew Vogel Ettin, Betrayals of the Body Politic: The Literary Commitments of Nadine Gordimer (1993)
• Dominic Head, Nadine Gordimer (1994)
• Christopher Heywood, Nadine Gordimer (1983)
• Rowland Smith, editor, Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer (1990)
• Barbara Temple-Thurston, Nadine Gordimer Revisited (1999) ISBN 0805746080
• Kathrin Wagner, Rereading Nadine Gordimer (1994)
• Louise Yelin, From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer (1998)

Short reviews

• Index of New York Times articles on Gordimer

Speeches and interviews

• Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin, and Marilyn Dallman Seymour, Conversations with Nadine Gordimer (1990)
• Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech (1991)

Biographies

• Ronald Suresh Roberts, No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer (2005)

Research archives

• Collection Index for Nadine Gordimer Short Stories and Novel Manuscript collection, 1958-1965 (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas)
• Guide to the Gordimer manuscripts, 1934-1991 (Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana)

Notes

1. ^ Per Wästberg, Nadine Gordimer and the South African Experience, April 26, 2001. (Nobel Prize article.). Cite error: The named reference "Wastberg" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
2. ^ "A Writer's Life: Nadine Gordimer", April 3, 2006, Telegraph.
3. ^ Nadine Gordimer, Guardian Unlimited (last visited Jan. 25, 2007).
4. ^ "Nadine Gordimer: A Sport of Nature, The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards].
5. New Yorker, June 9, 1951.
6. The W. H. Smith Commonwealth Literary Award.
7. The Late Bourgeouis World, was Gordimer's first personal experience with censorship; it was banned in 1966 by the South African government. Burger's Daughter, published in June, 1979, was banned one month later; Gordimer wrote an account of the censorship in "What Happened to Burger's Daughter or How South African Censorship Works". The Publications Committee's Appeal Board reversed the censorship shortly thereafter, determining that the book was too one-sided to be subversive. Gordimer responded to this decision in Essential Gesture (1988), pointing out that the board banned two books by black authors at the same time it unbanned her own work. July's People was also banned under apartheid, and faced censorship under the post-apartheid government as well: In 2001, a provincial education department temporarily removed July's People from the school reading list, describing it as patronizing and offensive.
8. ^ Donald Morrison, "Nadine Gordimer", Time Magazine 60 Years of Heroes (2006) Cite error: The named reference "Morrison" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
9. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1991, Nobel Prize Laureate biography.
10. ^ Agence France-Presse, Nobel laureates join battle against AIDS, Dec. 1, 2004. Cite error: The named reference "AIDS" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
11. Gordimer and literary giants fight AIDS, iafrica.com, 2004 Nov. 29.
12. Nadine Gordimer and Anthony Sampson, Letter to The New Review of Books, Nov. 16, 2000.
13. Christopher S. Wren, "Former Censors Bow Coldly to Apartheid Chronicler", New York Times, Oct. 6, 1991.
14. Judith Norman, "Special Commissioned Essay on The Lying Days".
15. The Conservationist was a co-winner with Stanley Middleton's novel Holiday.
16. Brief biography of Bram Fischer, Bram Fischer Human Rights Programme, Wits School of Law (2005; last visited 2007/4/4).
17. Dwight Garner and Nadine Gordimer, "The Salon Interview: Nadine Gordimer, March 1998.
18. Bookreporter.com, [http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides/house_gun.asp ReadingGroup Guide, The House Gun by Nadine Gordimer.
19. David Medalie, "'The Context of the Awful Event': Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun", Journal of South African Studies, v.25, n.4 (Dec. 1999), pp. 633-644.
20. J. M. Coetzee, "Awakening" (review of The Pickup and Loot and Other Stories), The New York Review of Books, v.50, n. 16 (Oct. 23, 2003).
21. Sue Kossew, "Review of Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup", Quodlibet, v.1, Feb. 2005.
22. Penguin Book Clubs/Reading Guides, Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup.
23. Anthony York, "The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer" (book review), Salon.com, Dec. 6, 2001.
24. Rachel Donadio, "Nadine Gordimer and the Hazards of Biography", New York Times, Dec. 31, 2006.
25. "Gordimer's sorrow for men who robbed her". Guardian Unlimited. November 2, 2006.
26. Nadine Gordimer awarded Legion of Honour, Mail & Guardian Online, April 1, 2007.

v t e Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature
1901–1920	1901: Sully Prudhomme 1902: Theodor Mommsen 1903: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 1904: Frédéric Mistral / José Echegaray 1905: Henryk Sienkiewicz 1906: Giosuè Carducci 1907: Rudyard Kipling 1908: Rudolf Eucken 1909: Selma Lagerlöf 1910: Paul Heyse 1911: Maurice Maeterlinck 1912: Gerhart Hauptmann 1913: Rabindranath Tagore 1914 1915: Romain Rolland 1916: Verner von Heidenstam 1917: Karl Gjellerup / Henrik Pontoppidan 1918 1919: Carl Spitteler 1920: Knut Hamsun
1921–1940	1921: Anatole France 1922: Jacinto Benavente 1923: W. B. Yeats 1924: Władysław Reymont 1925: George Bernard Shaw 1926: Grazia Deledda 1927: Henri Bergson 1928: Sigrid Undset 1929: Thomas Mann 1930: Sinclair Lewis 1931: Erik Axel Karlfeldt (posthumously) 1932: John Galsworthy 1933: Ivan Bunin 1934: Luigi Pirandello 1935 1936: Eugene O'Neill 1937: Roger Martin du Gard 1938: Pearl S. Buck 1939: Frans Eemil Sillanpää 1940
1941–1960	1941 1942 1943 1944: Johannes V. Jensen 1945: Gabriela Mistral 1946: Hermann Hesse 1947: André Gide 1948: T. S. Eliot 1949: William Faulkner 1950: Bertrand Russell 1951: Pär Lagerkvist 1952: François Mauriac 1953: Winston Churchill 1954: Ernest Hemingway 1955: Halldór Laxness 1956: Juan Ramón Jiménez 1957: Albert Camus 1958: Boris Pasternak 1959: Salvatore Quasimodo 1960: Saint-John Perse
1961–1980	1961: Ivo Andrić 1962: John Steinbeck 1963: Giorgos Seferis 1964: Jean-Paul Sartre (declined award) 1965: Mikhail Sholokhov 1966: Shmuel Yosef Agnon / Nelly Sachs 1967: Miguel Ángel Asturias 1968: Yasunari Kawabata 1969: Samuel Beckett 1970: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1971: Pablo Neruda 1972: Heinrich Böll 1973: Patrick White 1974: Eyvind Johnson / Harry Martinson 1975: Eugenio Montale 1976: Saul Bellow 1977: Vicente Aleixandre 1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer 1979: Odysseas Elytis 1980: Czesław Miłosz
1981–2000	1981: Elias Canetti 1982: Gabriel García Márquez 1983: William Golding 1984: Jaroslav Seifert 1985: Claude Simon 1986: Wole Soyinka 1987: Joseph Brodsky 1988: Naguib Mahfouz 1989: Camilo José Cela 1990: Octavio Paz 1991: Nadine Gordimer 1992: Derek Walcott 1993: Toni Morrison 1994: Kenzaburō Ōe 1995: Seamus Heaney 1996: Wisława Szymborska 1997: Dario Fo 1998: José Saramago 1999: Günter Grass 2000: Gao Xingjian
2001–2020	2001: V. S. Naipaul 2002: Imre Kertész 2003: J. M. Coetzee 2004: Elfriede Jelinek 2005: Harold Pinter 2006: Orhan Pamuk 2007: Doris Lessing 2008: J. M. G. Le Clézio 2009: Herta Müller 2010: Mario Vargas Llosa 2011: Tomas Tranströmer 2012: Mo Yan 2013: Alice Munro 2014: Patrick Modiano 2015: Svetlana Alexievich 2016: Bob Dylan 2017: Kazuo Ishiguro 2018: Olga Tokarczuk 2019: Peter Handke 2020: Louise Glück
2021–present	2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah 2022: Annie Ernaux 2023: Jon Fosse 2024: Han Kang 2025: to be determined

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