Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer and political activist, born in 1923 and died in 2014, whose novels and short stories addressed the moral and racial injustices of apartheid South Africa across a career of more than six decades. She won the Booker Prize in 1974 for her novel The Conservationist, and in 1991 she received the Nobel Prize in Literature, honored, in the Swedish Academy's words, as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity." A committed anti-apartheid activist, Gordimer joined the African National Congress while it was banned under apartheid law and assisted Nelson Mandela in preparing the speech he delivered at his 1964 trial.
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AwardNobel Prize in Literature, 1991; also awarded the Booker Prize in 1974 for The Conservationist. 1 Classification
Original Language FAQs
What did Nadine Gordimer write about?
Individual lives set against South Africa's apartheid and post-apartheid history.
Gordimer wrote novels, short stories and essays. In the 1960s and 1970s she wrote a number of novels set against the emerging resistance movement against apartheid, and her later work from the 1990s is set in a liberated South Africa. The Nobel Prize Outreach biography notes that the stories of individuals are always at the center of her narratives, in relation to external limitations and frameworks, and that together her books create a rich picture of South Africa's historical development.
Were Nadine Gordimer's books banned under apartheid?
Several of her books were banned by the apartheid regime.
Yes. The Nobel Prize Outreach biography states that Gordimer was involved in the anti-apartheid movement early on and that several of her books were banned by the apartheid regime. It also names The Conservationist (1974) as the novel that gave her international breakthrough.
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Source Nadine Gordimer (Wikipedia)tier 2
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1. Nadine Gordimer (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)Wikipedia lead sentence, opening parenthetical birth-death dates
Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923-13 July 2014) was a South African writer and political activist.
Wikipedia lead sentence, Nobel Prize citation
She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognised as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity".
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