Nadine Gordimer
(b. 1923)

The fiction of Nadine Gordimer has been shaped by her life in South Africa and by her firm opposition to the government's policy of apartheid. Initially honored for her short fiction, she says that in time she found the short story "too delicate for what I have to say." In recent years her novels—some of them banned in South Africa—have gained international reputation.

Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, South Africa, a small town near Johannesburg. Her mother took her out of a local private school when she was 11, and from then until she was 16 she "read tremendously," wrote much fiction, and published her first adult short story, "Come Again Tomorrow," when she was 15. She studied for a year at the University of Witwatersrand, continuing to write short stories. The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952) was the first collection of her stories to be published in the United States.

Following the critical success of the book, Gordimer's stories began appearing in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper's, and other well-known periodicals. In her stories, she often describes the enforced entrapment of whites who have inherited political and economic power in South Africa's closed society. Frequently, she builds a personal tale around a fleeting but sharply focused moment of insight.

In her short stories, and later in her novels—including the critically acclaimed A Guest of Honor (1970) and Burgers Daughter (1979)—she displays an ability to write from the perspective of Anglo, black, and Afrikaner and to delineate a variety of economic and social settings. She writes as a compassionate observer of the human condition. In lyric tones, yet without sentimentality, she pictures the South African scene with awareness and humanity, stressing the themes of understanding, adjustment, and forgiveness.

Until she was 30, Nadine Gordimer had never been outside South Africa. Since then, she has traveled widely and lectured in a number of universities, including Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Michigan.

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