Nadine Gordimer

South African novelist and short-story writer, who received Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. Most of Nadine Gordimer's works deal with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. She was a founding member of Congress of South African Writers, and even at the height of the apartheid regime, she never considered going into exile.

"A line in a statute book has more authority than the claims of one man's love or another's. All claims of natural feeling are over-ridden alike by a line in a statute book that takes no account of humanness, that recognizes neither love nor respect nor jealousy nor rivalry nor compassion nor hate - nor any human attitude where there are black and white together. What Boaz felt towards Ann; what Gideon felt towards Ann, what Ann felt about Boaz, what she felt for Gideon - all this that was real and rooted in life was void before the clumsy words that reduced the delicacy and towering complexity of living to a race theory..." (from Occasion for Loving, 1963)

Nadine Gordimer was born into a well-off family in Springs, Transvaal, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. It was the setting for Gordimer's first novel, THE LYING DAYS (1953). Her father was a Jewish jeweler originally from Latvia and her mother of British descent. From her early childhood Gordimer witnessed how the white minority increasingly weakened the rights of the black majority. Gordimer was educated in a convent school. She spent a year at Witwaterstrand University, Johannesburg without taking a degree.

Often kept at home by a mother who imagined she had a weak heart, Gordimer began writing from the age of nine. Her first story, 'Come Again Tomorrow', appeared in the children's section of the Johannesburg magazine Forum when she was only fourteen. By her twenties, Gordimer had had stories published in many of the local magazines. In 1951 the New Yorker accepted a story, publishing her ever since.

From her first collection of short stories, FACE TO FACE (1949), which is not listed in some of her biographies, Gordimer has revealed the psychological consequences of a racially divided society. The novel The Lying Days (1953) was based largely on the author's own life and depicted a white girl, Helen, and her growing disaffection toward the narrow-mindlessness of a small-town life. Other works in the 1950s and 1960s include A WORLD OF STRANGERS (1958), OCCASION FOR LOVING (1963), and THE LATE BOURGEOIS WORLD (1966).