Nadine Gordimer

Origins and early life

Nadine Gordimer was born on 20 November 1923 near Springs, a mining town on the East Rand outside Johannesburg, to Jewish parents: her father Isidore was a watchmaker from Žagarė in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, who had come to South Africa at thirteen; her mother Hannah Myers was a Jewish immigrant from London.

Work and career

The household was secular. Her mother, troubled by the poverty and discrimination black South Africans lived under, founded a crèche for black children, and Gordimer traced her own political sense in part to that. Kept out of school by a mother convinced she had a weak heart, she read and wrote at home, published her first children's story at thirteen in 1937 and adult fiction at sixteen. She studied for a year at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she first mixed across the colour bar, and settled in Johannesburg in 1948.

The New Yorker took a story in 1951; her first novel, The Lying Days, followed in 1953. The arrest of her closest friend and the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 brought her into the anti-apartheid movement. She joined the African National Congress while it was banned, hid its leaders in her house, helped Nelson Mandela edit his 1964 speech from the dock, and testified for twenty-two activists at the 1986 Delmas treason trial.

The regime banned The Late Bourgeois World, A World of Strangers and Burger's Daughter. She won the Booker Prize for The Conservationist in 1974 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, and died on 13 July 2014.