South African · b. 1923
South African novelist and Nobel laureate who documented apartheid and its aftermath across six decades of fiction, remaining in South Africa throughout and actively supporting the ANC.
Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923 in Springs, a mining town east of Johannesburg, to white Jewish immigrant parents, and grew up at one remove from the racial system that organized every aspect of South African life. That position — privileged, uneasy, implicated — became the subject of her fiction. She never left South Africa during the apartheid years, a choice she made deliberately against a tide of exile, reasoning that she could not write about a country she had abandoned. Three of her novels were banned by the apartheid government, which was, as she noted dryly, a form of literary criticism that at least confirmed the work was doing something.
The major novels span the full arc of apartheid and its aftermath with unflinching attention to how political systems deform private life. The Conservationist, which shared the Booker Prize in 1974, tracks a white farmer’s relationship to land he cannot truly possess. Burger’s Daughter follows the child of a Communist anti-apartheid activist trying to find her own moral ground. July’s People — published in 1981 and still startling — imagined a future South Africa in violent upheaval, white liberals dependent on the grace of their former servant. My Son’s Story brought a Coloured ANC activist and his family into the center of the narrative, the novel’s form — a son discovering his father’s affair with a white activist — enacting the entanglements of race and desire that apartheid tried to legislate out of existence.
The 1991 Nobel Prize arrived just as apartheid was collapsing; Nelson Mandela, released from prison the previous year, was a personal friend. Gordimer continued writing through the post-apartheid decades, grappling with the new contradictions of a democratic South Africa still defined by economic inequality, HIV, and the distance between political freedom and social justice. She died in 2014 at ninety. Her work remains essential not because it is historical document — though it is that — but because she understood that the moral damage a political system inflicts on individuals is the truest measure of what that system is.
by Nadine Gordimer
Rosa Burger is the daughter of Lionel Burger, a white South African Communist who died in prison for the anti-apartheid cause. What does it mean to be a martyr's daughter? To inherit a political identity you did not choose? To leave, as Rosa does, for Europe? Gordimer's most personal and most psychological novel, banned in South Africa upon publication.
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by Nadine Gordimer
A civil war has ended apartheid. A white South African couple (the Smales) and their children flee Johannesburg with their Black servant July to his rural village. Now they live in his world, dependent on him, subject to his authority. Gordimer's most formally precise novel—the revolution imagined as a reversal of domestic power.
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by Nadine Gordimer
Will, a 'coloured' South African teenager, discovers his father Sonny—a political activist—is having an affair with a white woman who works for the anti-apartheid movement. The novel is narrated by Will and is about the cost of the political life on the family that sustains it. Gordimer's most personal meditation on the activist's divided loyalties.
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by Nadine Gordimer
Mehring is a wealthy white industrialist who buys a farm outside Johannesburg—not to farm it but to own it, to have somewhere to be. When a Black man's body is found buried on his land and ignored by authorities, the body becomes the novel's center of gravity—insisting on its presence, waiting to be claimed. Gordimer's Booker Prize winner.
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by Nadine Gordimer
James Bray, a British colonial official who was expelled from a newly independent African country for supporting the independence movement, is invited back ten years later to advise the government. He discovers the revolutionary leaders have become the new oppressors. Gordimer's most geopolitically ambitious novel.
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