Gordimer, Nadine

Gordimer, Nadine (nādēn' gôr'dumur) [key], 1923–, South African writer, b. Springs. She published her first short story at age 15 and later many of her stories appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Her stories often combine the political and the personal, showing a fine sensitivity to the complexities of human relationships. Her collections include Selected Stories (1975), A Soldier's Embrace (1980), Jump and Other Stories (1991), Why Haven't You Written?: Selected Stories 1950–1972 (1993), Loot and Other Stories (2003), and Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories (2007). A member of the African National Congress, Gordimer was often militantly critical of South African life in her fiction. She tendered little moral hope for whites who lived under apartheid and fought the system in her political life and her writings. In 1991 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her novels include The Late Bourgeois World (1966), A Guest of Honor (1970), The Conservationist (1974, Booker Prize), Burger's Daughter (1979), July's People (1981), My Son's Story (1990), The House Gun (1998), The Pickup (2001), and Get a Life (2005). She has also written many essays, often political or literary; they are collected in The Essential Gesture (1988), Writing and Being (1995), Living in Hope and History (1999), and other books. In 1998 she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Program's “Decade for the Eradication of Poverty.”

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

• • Cite
  • Print