Gordimer, Nadine (1923– )

South African novelist and short-story writer. Internationally acclaimed for her fiction and regarded by many as South Africa's conscience, Gordimer was for many years one of the most prominent opponents of apartheid and censorship. Her novel The Conservationist (1974) won the Booker Prize, and she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

Much of Gordimer's fiction is set in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is generated by a complex set of public and private concerns, chief among which are the family, sexuality, interracial social interaction and the imperatives of political commitment in the context of apartheid. Some of her work was banned in her native country during apartheid.

Gordimer was born near Johannesburg. She began to write at the age of 9 and had a short story published at 15. She studied at university in Johannesburg and has since travelled widely, although is still based in South Africa. Her first collection of short stories, Face to Face, was published in 1949. Her first novel, The Lying Days, followed in 1953. Her political ideology evolved from the liberal humanism that dominates her novels from her autobiographical The Lying Days, to later works such as The Late Bourgeois World (1966), and contributed to the radicalism that increasingly informs subsequent novels such as The Conservationist, July's People (1981), and My Son's Story (1990). None to Accompany Me (1994) is set during South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy, while The House Gun (1998) focuses on issues raised by a murder in the post-apartheid context. An accomplished practitioner of the short story, Gordimer's many collections include Jump and Other Stories (1991). Her non-fiction includes the essay collections The Essential Gesture (1988) and Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century (1999).