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Gordimer Nadine
(born 1923)

Gordimer Nadine 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 parents were both Jewish immigrants, her father having emigrated from Lithuania, and her mother from London.

Gordimer was educated at a Catholic convent school, and was largely home-bound as a child because of family fears that she had a weak heart. She began writing at an early age, and published her first stories in 1937 at the age of fifteen. 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; "Come Again Tomorrow," another children's story, appeared in Forum around the same time.

Gordimer studied for a year at Witwatersrand University but did not complete her degree. Instead, she continued to write, publishing mostly in local South African magazines. She collected many of these early stories in Face to Face, published in 1949.

In 1951, the New Yorker accepted Gordimer's story "A Watcher of the Dead", beginning a long relationship. Gordimer, who has said she believes the short story is the literary form for our age, has continued to publish short stories, often in the New Yorker as well as other prominent literary journals.

Gordimer's first novel, The Lying Days, was published in 1953. 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" lasted until his death from emphysema in 2001. It was her second marriage and his third. Their son, Hugo, was born in 1955, and is today a filmmaker in New York. Gordimer has collaborated with her son on at least two documentaries.

During the 1960s and 1970s she taught at several universities in the United States. She demanded that South Africa re-examine and replace its long held policy of apartheid. Most of her works deal with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. Three of her books were banned in her home country by the apartheid regime, but she won international recognition for her work.

She was first recognized internationally with the W. H. Smith Commonwealth Literary Award (England) in 1961, followed by the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (England) in 1972. In 1974 she won the Booker Prize for her novel The Conservationist. She has also been recognized in South Africa with the CNA Prize (1974, 1975, 1980); in France with the Grand Aigle d'Or (1975); in Scotland with the Scottish Arts Council Neil M. Gunn Fellowship (1981); in the United States with the Modern Language Association Award (1982) and the Bennett Award (1987); in Italy with the Premio Malaparte (1985); in Germany with the Nelly Sachs Prize (1986). She refused to accept "shortlisting" in 1988 for the Orange Prize, because it is an award that recognizes only women writers. Her international recognition culminated with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, which noted that Gordimer "through her magnificent epic writing has — in the words of Alfred Nobel — been of very great benefit to humanity".

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.

Antigua, 1995, Nadine Gordimer

Guinea Bissau, 2009, Nadine Gordimer

South Africa, 1996, Nadin Gordimer

Sweden, 1998, Nadine Gorimer