- Person
- Nadine Gordimer
- Lived
- 1923–2014
- Field
- Literature
- From
- South African
The story
Nadine Gordimer was born on 20 November 1923 in Springs, near Johannesburg, to Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a watchmaker from Žagarė in the Russian Empire, and her mother was born in London. Her mother founded a crèche for Black children, and as a teenager Gordimer saw police raid the family home and seize letters and diaries. She published her first story at 13.
The arrest of her best friend, Bettie du Toit, in 1960 and the Sharpeville massacre that same year drew her into the struggle against apartheid. From then on her fiction looked unflinchingly at what racial segregation did to people on both sides of the colour line: the fear, the injustice, the compromises and the courage. Her novels and stories portrayed life under apartheid for a global readership at a time when the regime wanted its realities hidden.
The government responded with censorship. A World of Strangers was banned for twelve years, and The Late Bourgeois World was banned in 1976 for a decade. Burger's Daughter, published in June 1979 and written after the Soweto uprising, follows the daughter of anti-apartheid revolutionaries. It was banned a month after publication, though the ban was reversed on appeal a few months later. Gordimer said that when your books are banned, you feel a bit of a ghost in your own country.
She did not only write. She was close to Nelson Mandela's defence lawyers during the Rivonia Trial and helped Mandela edit his famous speech from the dock. She testified at the 1986 Delmas Treason Trial on behalf of 22 activists, and sat on the steering committee of the Anti-Censorship Action Group.
She also worked to give other writers a voice. She was a founding member and patron of the Congress of South African Writers, and said she would use part of her Nobel Prize money to support Black South African writers through it. She also served as a vice president of International PEN, which defends writers' freedom of expression.
Why it matters
Gordimer's books remain a vivid record of life under apartheid, helping readers everywhere understand its cruelty, and her support helped Black South African writers find their voices.
About Nadine Gordimer
Nobel-winning South African novelist whose fiction showed the world what apartheid did to every life it touched, and who fought censorship and racial injustice for six decades.
More about Nadine Gordimer
Sources
- Nadine Gordimer Wikipedia
- South African Writer Nadine Gordimer Dies at 90 Voice of America
- Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer dies Mail & Guardian
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.