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Nadine Gordimer

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Nadine Gordimer
File:Gordimer.gif
Born (1923-11-23) November 23, 1923 (age 101)
Springs, Gauteng, Johannesburg, South Africa
OccupationPlaywright, Novelist
NationalitySouth African

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

Early life

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.

Early adulthood and literary career

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.

Recognition and continued political engagement

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.

Recent Events

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Gordimer was the subject of a 2006 biography by Ronald Suresh Roberts, which she repudiated after its publication.

Gordimer was robbed at her home in the Parktown suburb of Johannesburg in October, 2006. She later said the four men responsible were products of a society grappling with the legacy of South Africa's past, and suggested that providing education, training and employment was the way to reduce crime, not more police.

Bibliography

Fiction

Short story collections

Plays

Essays

Other works

Adaptations of Gordimer's works

  • "The Gordimer Stories" (1981-82) - adaptations of seven of Gordimer's short stories; she wrote screenplays for four of them

References

  1. "Nadine Gordimer", Guardian Unlimited (last visited Jan. 25, 2007).
  2. New Yorker, June 9, 1951.
  3. "Nadine Gordimer", Guardian Unlimited, at http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,,96530,00.html .
  4. "A writer's life: Nadine Gordimer", London Telegraph, April 6, 2003.
  5. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1991, Nobel Prize Laureate biography.
  6. Rachel Donadio, "Nadine Gordimer and the Hazards of Biography", New York Times, Dec. 31, 2006.
  8. "Gordimer's sorrow for men who robbed her". Guardian Unlimited. November 2, 2006.

Further reading

  • Literary biography at LitWeb (2003)
  • Stephen Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (1986)
  • John Cooke, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer
  • Andrew Vogel Ettin, Betrayals of the Body Politic: The Literary Commitments of Nadine Gordimer (1993)
  • Nadine Gordimer, Nancy Topping Bazin, and Marilyn Dallman Seymour, Conversations with Nadine Gordimer (1990)
  • Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech (1991)
  • Dominic Head, Nadine Gordimer (1994)
  • Christopher Heywood, Nadine Gordimer (1983)
  • Ronald Suresh Roberts, No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer (2005)
  • Rowland Smith, editor, Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer (1990)
  • Barbara Temple-Thurston, Nadine Gordimer Revisited (1999) ISBN 0805746080
  • Kathrin Wagner, Rereading Nadine Gordimer (1994)
  • Louise Yelin, From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer (1998)

See also

External links


Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature
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1921–1940
1941–1960
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Recipients of the Booker Prize
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