Nadine Gordimer
1924 -

Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs in 1924. She obtained her early education at a convent school and attended the University of Witwatersrand for her higher education. In 1949 she married G. Gavran and published her first collection of short stories, Face to Face that same year. In 1954, she married again, this time to a Jewish refugee, Reinhold Cassirer and together they have two children. In her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), the heroine has to free herself from her mining background prejudices, she learns from the intellectuals she meets and eventually she deals with her guilt with regard to racial hatred that she witnesses. Nadine has been an unwavering critic of apartheid and supporter of human rights and many of her books were banned South Africa but widely read around the world.

The Academy selected Gordimer's novel, A Guest of Honour, as a landmark in her early writings, but praised the complex technique, which she later developed. She has written ten novels, including the prize-winning, My Son's Story (1990), and more than 200 short stories. A fine descriptive writer, thoughtful and sensitive, she is noted for the vivid precision of her writing about the complicated personal and social relationships in her environment: the interplay between races, racial conflict, and the pain inflicted by South Africa's unjust apartheid laws. As a member of the ANC, in December 1989 she testified in the mitigation for eleven UDF leaders and Vaal Civic Association activists. For many years, she has been on the Transvaal regional executive of the Congress of South African Writers (Cosaw), whose members are mainly black and generally regarded as writers highly 'committed' to the black cause. Nadine is also a prominent member of the Anti-Censorship Action Group and has won the CNA Literary Award four times, the most recent being in 1991. She was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature.