Nadine Gordimer

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Nadine Gordimer (born November 20, 1923) is a South African novelist and writer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in literature and 1974 Booker Prize.

She was born in Springs, Gauteng, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg, the daughter of Isidore and Nan Gordimer. Her father was Jewish and emigrated from Lithuania 13 years old, and her mother was English. Nadine Gordimer was raised a Christian. She lives in Johannesburg. Gordimer was educated at an Anglican convent school. Thereafter she studied for a year at Witwatersrand University but did not complete her degree. During the 1960s and 1970s she taught at several universities in the United States. She drew praise for her demand that South Africa re-examine and replace its long held policy of apartheid. As such, most of her works deal with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country.

Her first published work was a short story for children, "The Quest for Seen Gold," which appeared in the Children's Sunday Express in 1937. Her first book of short stories, Face to Face, was published in 1949. Her first book, The Lying Days, was published in 1953. A founding member of the Congress of South African Writers, Gordimer has been awarded numerous honorary degrees (the first being Doctor Honoris Causa at Leuven University in Belgium), as well as France's Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

In 1954, she married Reinhold Cassirer, a highly respected art dealer who established the South African Sotheby's and later ran his own gallery; their "wonderful marriage," as she referred to it in a 2003 newspaper interview (it was her second marriage and his third), lasted until his death from emphysema in 2001. Their son, Hugo, was born in 1955.

Bibliography

Fiction

• The Lying Days (1953)
• A World of Strangers (1958)
• Occasion for Loving (1963)
• The Late Bourgeois World (1966)
• A Guest of Honour (1970)
• The Conservationist (1974)
• Burger's Daughter (1979)
• July's People (1981)
• A Sport of Nature (1987)
• My Son's Story (1990)
• None to Accompany Me (1994)
• The House Gun (1998)
• The Pickup (2001)
• Get a Life (2005)

Short story collections

• Face to Face (1949)
• The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952)
• Six feet of the Country (1956)
• Not for Publication (1965)
• Livingstone's Companions (1970)
• Selected Stories (1975)
• No Place Like: Selected Stories (1978)
• A Soldier's Embrace (1980)
• Something Out There (1984)
• Correspondence Course and other Stories (1984)
• Jump: And Other Stories (1991)
• Why Haven't You Written: Selected Stories 1950-1972 (1992)
• Loot: And Other Stories (2003)

Plays

• The First Circle (1949) pub. in Six One-Act Plays

Non-fiction

• The Essential Gesture (1988)
• On the Mines (1973)
• The Black Interpreters (1973)
• Lifetimes Under Apartheid (1986)
• Writing and Being (1995)

See also

• List of African writers

External links

• [Text of her Nobel acceptance speech]
• [Nadine Gordimer] at [www.contemporarywriters.com]

 

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