Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) was a South African novelist and short-story writer who received the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature for fiction that, in the words of the Swedish Academy, "has been of very great benefit to humanity." Born in the small mining town of Springs east of Johannesburg to Jewish immigrant parents — a Latvian father and a London mother — she was kept out of school for several years by an over-anxious mother and turned to writing during the long days at home.

Her first short story appeared in a children's section of a Johannesburg newspaper when she was thirteen. By her early twenties she was placing stories in The New Yorker, a relationship that lasted more than fifty years. Her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), set the pattern for a body of work that examined the moral position of the white liberal under apartheid: comfortable, complicit, and slowly forced into political clarity.

Three of her novels were banned outright by the South African censors — A World of Strangers (1958), The Late Bourgeois World (1966), and Burger's Daughter (1979). The last, modeled on the family of the imprisoned communist Bram Fischer, was smuggled to Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. The Conservationist shared the 1974 Booker Prize, and July's People (1981) imagined a near-future revolutionary collapse of white rule.

Gordimer joined the African National Congress in the 1960s when membership was illegal, helped Mandela edit the speech he delivered upon his 1990 release, and served as a witness for defendants in the 1986 Delmas Treason Trial.

The name Nadine is a French form of the Slavic Nadezhda, meaning "hope." She wrote hope into a country that needed it.