Nadine Gordimer (20 November 192313 July 2014) was a South African writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognised as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity".
Gordimer was one of the most honoured female writers of her generation. She received the Booker Prize for The Conservationist (1974), and the Central News Agency Literary Award for The Conservationist, Burger's Daughter (1979) and July's People (1981).
Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger's Daughter were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organisation was banned, and gave Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 defence speech at the trial which led to his conviction for life. She later became active in HIV/AIDS causes.
Early life Gordimer was born to Jewish parents near Springs, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. She was the second daughter of Isidore Gordimer (1887–1962), a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant watchmaker from Žagarė (then part of the Russian Empire), and Hannah "Nan" ( Myers) Gordimer (1897–1973), a British Jewish immigrant from London. Her father was raised with an Orthodox Jewish education before immigrating with his family to South Africa at the age of 13. Her mother was from an established family and came to South Africa at the age of 6 with her parents. Gordimer was raised in a secular household. Her mother was not religiously observant, and mostly assimilated, whereas her father maintained a membership of the local Orthodox synagogue and attended once a year for the Yom Kippur services.Gordimer, Nadine.A South African Childhood The New Yorker. 8 October 1954
Family background Gordimer's early interest in racial and economic inequality in South Africa was shaped in part by her parents. Her father's experience as a refugee from Tsarist Russia helped form Gordimer's political identity, but he was neither an activist nor particularly sympathetic toward the experiences of black people under apartheid."A Writer's Life: Nadine Gordimer", Telegraph, 3 April 2006. Conversely, Gordimer saw activism by her mother, whose concern about the poverty and discrimination faced by black people in South Africa led her to found a crèche for black children. Gordimer also witnessed government repression first-hand as a teenager; the police raided her family home, confiscating letters and diaries from a servant's room.
Gordimer was educated at a Catholic convent school, but was largely home-bound as a child because her mother, for "strange reasons of her own", did not put her into school (apparently, she feared that Gordimer had a weak heart). Home-bound and often isolated, she began writing at an early age, and published her first stories in 1937 at the age of 13.Nadine Gordimer, Guardian Unlimited (last visited 25 January 2007). 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; "Come Again Tomorrow", another children's story, appeared in Forum around the same time. At the age of 16, she had her first adult fiction published.Nadine Gordimer: A Sport of Nature, The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.
Career Gordimer studied for a year at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she mixed for the first time with fellow professionals across the colour bar. She also became involved in the Sophiatown renaissance. She did not complete her degree, but moved to Johannesburg in 1948, where she lived thereafter. While taking classes in Johannesburg, she continued to write, publishing mostly in local South African magazines. She collected many of these early stories in Face to Face, published in 1949.
In 1951, The New Yorker accepted Gordimer's story "A Watcher of the Dead",New Yorker, 9 June 1951. beginning a long relationship, and bringing Gordimer's work to a much larger public. Gordimer, who said she believed the short story was the literary form for our age, continued to publish short stories in The New Yorker and other prominent literary journals. Her first publisher, Lulu Friedman, was the wife of the Parliamentarian Bernard Friedman, and it was at their house, "Tall Trees" in First Avenue, Lower Houghton, Johannesburg, that Gordimer met other anti-apartheid writers. Gordimer's first novel, The Lying Days, was published in 1953.
Activism and professional life The arrest of her best friend, Bettie du Toit, in 1960 and the Sharpeville massacre spurred Gordimer's entry into the anti-apartheid movement. Thereafter, she quickly became active in South African politics, and was close friends with Nelson Mandela's defence attorneys (Bram Fischer and George Bizos) during his 1962 trial. She also helped Mandela edit his famous speech "I Am Prepared to Die", given from the defendant's dock at the trial. When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, she was one of the first people he wanted to see.
During the 1960s and 1970s, she continued to live in Johannesburg, although she occasionally left for short periods of time to teach at several universities in the United States. She had begun to achieve international literary recognition, receiving her first major literary award, the W. H. Smith Commonwealth Literary Award, in 1961. Throughout this time, Gordimer continued to demand through both her writing and her activism that South Africa re-examine and replace its long-held policy of apartheid. In 1973, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Artur Lundkvist of the Swedish Academy's Nobel committee.
During this time, the South African government banned several of her works, two for lengthy periods of time. The Late Bourgeois World was Gordimer's first personal experience with censorship; it was banned in 1976 for a decade by the South African government.Jonathan Steele, "White magic", The Guardian (London), 27 October 2001.Gail Caldwell, "South African Writer Given Nobel", The Boston Globe, 4 October 1991. A World of Strangers was banned for twelve years. Other works were censored for lesser amounts of time. Burger's Daughter, published in June 1979, was banned one month later. The Publications Committee's Appeal Board reversed the censorship of Burger's Daughter three months later, determining that the book was too one-sided to be subversive."", BookForum, Feb / March 2006. Gordimer responded to this decision in Essential Gesture (1988), pointing out that the board banned two books by black authors at the same time it unbanned her own work.Gordimer wrote an account of the censorship in "What Happened to Burger's Daughter or How South African Censorship Works". Gordimer's subsequent novels escaped censorship under apartheid."Burger’s Daughter was the last of Gordimer’s novels to enter the censorship system. Though her short-story collection A Soldier’s Embrace (1980) was scrutinised and passed in 1980, July’s People (1981), A Sport of Nature (1987), and My Son’s Story (1990) appear not to have been submitted in any of their editions." Peter D. McDonald, The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 239. In 2001, a provincial education department temporarily removed July's People from the school reading list, along with works by other anti-apartheid writers,BBC News, "South Africa reinstates authors", 22 April 2001."Gordimer detractors 'insulting', says Asmal ", News24.com, 19 April 2001. describing July's People as "deeply racist, superior and patronising"Anuradha Kumar, "New Boundaries", The Hindu, 1 August 2004.—a characterisation that Gordimer took as a grave insult, and that many literary and political figures protested.
In South Africa, she joined the African National Congress when it was still listed as an illegal organisation by the South African government.Donald Morrison, "Nadine Gordimer", Time Magazine, 60 Years of Heroes (2006). While never blindly loyal to any organisation, Gordimer saw the ANC as the best hope for reversing South Africa's treatment of black citizens. Rather than simply criticising the organisation for its perceived flaws, she advocated joining it to address them. She hid ANC leaders in her own home to aid their escape from arrest by the government, and she said that the proudest day of her life was when she testified at the 1986 Delmas Treason Trial on behalf of 22 South African anti-apartheid activists. (See Simon Nkoli, Mosiuoa Lekota, etc.) Throughout these years she also regularly took part in anti-apartheid demonstrations in South Africa, and traveled internationally speaking out against South African apartheid and discrimination and political repression.
Her works began achieving literary recognition early in her career, with her first international recognition in 1961, followed by numerous literary awards throughout the ensuing decades. Literary recognition for her accomplishments culminated with the Nobel Prize for Literature on 3 October 1991, which noted that Gordimer "through her magnificent epic writing has—in the words of Alfred Nobel—been of very great benefit to humanity".
Gordimer's activism was not limited to the struggle against apartheid. She resisted censorship and state control of information, and fostered the literary arts. She refused to let her work be aired by the South African Broadcasting Corporation because it was controlled by the apartheid government.Christopher S. Wren, "Former Censors Bow Coldly to Apartheid Chronicler", New York Times, 6 October 1991. Gordimer also served on the steering committee of South Africa's Anti-Censorship Action Group. A founding member of the Congress of South African Writers, Gordimer was also active in South African letters and international literary organisations. She was Vice President of International PEN.
In the post-apartheid 1990s and 21st century, Gordimer was active in the HIV/AIDS movement, addressing a significant public health crisis in South Africa. In 2004, she organised about 20 major writers to contribute short fiction for Telling Tales, a fundraising book for South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, which lobbies for government funding for HIV/AIDS prevention and care.Agence France-Presse, "Nobel laureates join battle against AIDS", 1 December 2004. On this matter, she was critical of the South African government, noting in 2004 that she approved of everything President Thabo Mbeki had done except his stance on AIDS.Gordimer and literary giants fight AIDS , iafrica.com, 29 November 2004.Nadine Gordimer and Anthony Sampson, Letter to The New Review of Books, 16 November 2000.
In 2005, Gordimer went on lecture tours and spoke on matters of foreign policy and discrimination beyond South Africa. For instance, in 2005, when Fidel Castro fell ill, Gordimer joined six other Nobel prize winners in a public letter to the United States warning it not to seek to destabilise Cuba's communist government. Gordimer's resistance to discrimination extended to her even refusing to accept "shortlisting" in 1998 for the Orange Prize, because the award recognizes only women writers. Gordimer also taught at the Massey College of the University of Toronto as a lecturer in 2006.
She was a vocal critic of the ANC government's Protection of State Information Bill, publishing a lengthy condemnation in The New York Review of Books in 2012.South Africa: The New Threat to Freedom The New York Review of Books. 24 May 2012
Personal life