Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer (born 20 November 1923) is a South African novelist and writer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in literature and 1974 Booker Prize.

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 having emigrated from Latvia, and her mother from London. She lives in Johannesburg. Gordimer was educated at a Catholic convent school. Thereafter she studied for a year at Witwatersrand University but did not complete her degree. During the 1960s and 1970s she taught at several universities in the United States. She drew praise for her demand that South Africa re-examine and replace its long held policy of apartheid. Most of her works deal with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country.

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. Her first book of short stories, Face to Face, was published in 1949. Her first novel, The Lying Days, was published in 1953. A founding member of the Congress of South African Writers, Gordimer has been awarded numerous honorary degrees (the first being Doctor Honoris Causa at Leuven University in Belgium), as well as France's Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

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," as she referred to it in a 2003 newspaper interview (it was her second marriage and his third), lasted until his death from emphysema in 2001. Their son, Hugo, was born in 1955.

She was robbed on 26 October 2006 by three black men in her home in Parktown, Johannesburg, and was assaulted after she refused to hand over her wedding ring. The (London) Sunday Times’ Durban correspondent, R.W. Johnson observed, “There is a grim irony to the attack, for Gordimer’s novels are all focused on the inhumanities of apartheid — with blacks always the victims, not, as in this case, the perpetrators.” [1]

• 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 (1981)
• 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)

• 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)
• Loot: And Other Stories (2003)

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

• The Essential Gesture (1988)
• The Black Interpreters (1973)
• Writing and Being (1995)

• On the Mines (1973)
• Lifetimes Under Apartheid (1986)

• List of African writers

Wikiquote has quotations related to Nadine Gordimer.

• Text of her Nobel acceptance speech
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