theguardian.com

Nadine Gordimer

  • ️Guardian Staff
  • ️Tue Jul 22 2008

"Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of 'the South African way of life'. "

Birthplace

Transvaal, South Africa

Education

University of Witswatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa (English)

Did you know?

For a 1976 collection of 700 authors' self-portraits, Gordimer drew a picture of two cats.

Critical verdict

A political novelist celebrated for her grasp of history and delicate sensitivity to the human tensions of apartheid, three of her 22 books have been banned in her native South Africa. Having moved from a position of individual humanism, she now defines as African an author "of whatever skin colour who shares with Africans the experience of having been shaped, mentally and spiritually, by Africa rather than anywhere else in the world." Critics found a lack of warmth in her detached, analytical earlier work, ascribed by some to the dehumanising influence of apartheid. She won the Booker Prize in 1974 (The Conservationist), in 1988 refused to be shortlisted for the women-only Orange Prize, and received the Nobel Prize in 1991, the first woman in 25 years to do so. "Through her magnificent epic writing she has - in the words of Alfred Nobel - been of very great benefit to humanity," the judges declared.

Begin with the short story collection Crimes of Conscience. Gordimer believes the short story is the form for our age, "where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the only thing one can be sure of - the present moment." Writing and Being is a sensitive, personal critique of the writer's post-colonial project.

Influences

Although she calls herself "a natural writer", having had her first story published at 15, she admits that "Proust, Chekhov and Dostoevsky, to name only a few to whom I owe my existence as a writer, were my professors.

Now read on

JM Coetzee shares her political concerns, though is denser and more experimental in language and style. Also try André Brink and Alan Paton.

A Writing Life: Celebrating Nadine Gordimer contains a variety of tributes from other authors.

Criticism

Read her essay collection The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places.

Background
· Web resources on Nadine Gordimer on the Nobel prize website
· 1998 Salon interview on The House Gun
· The Roland Collection: audio and video clips of Nadine Gordimer