Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, being the first South African, and seventh woman to be awarded. Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, Transvaal, which is in South Africa, she was born to Isidore and Nan Gordimer. The Laureate continues to live in South Africa as she has all her life. She began writing when she was nine and published her first story when she was 15 years old. She attended Witwatersrand University for one year but didn’t get any sort of degree. Nadine refused to move abroad even when she married Reinhold Cassirer, who is a refugee of Nazi, Germany. Her daughter lives in France and her son in New York; even though her children are away she still resides in South Africa.
In all of her works there have been thirty different language translations. Nadine has been awarded fifteen honorary doctorates and has received major literary prizes. As of April 2001, according to Per Wastberg, author of, Nadine Gordimer and the South African Experience, “over half a century, Gordimer has written thirteen novels, over 200 short stories, and several volumes of essays” (par. 2). Her work primarily focuses on the destructive effects of former system of apartheid in South Africa.
Gordimer was very involved in the anti-apartheid struggle. When she was young her parents didn’t really pay much attention to the segregation. If it wasn’t for a local library she may have never started writing, it was then that she saw it, blacks were not allowed to use the local library. “For fifty years, Gordimer has been the Geiger counter of apartheid and of the movements of people across the crust of South Africa.” (Watsberg 2) Most of Gordimer’s first novels were about racism and white liberals’ inadequate responses to it. In these novels it was the blacks that would be “in charge”, whites would have to redefine themselves, because they would be together more often. Nadine Gordimer created a “free zone” where it was possible for people to see what it was like outside of apartheid. Gordimer also joined the African National Congress (ANC), when she was young before it was even legal. (Watsberg 2)
In her works she portrayed what it was like in South Africa, in her book July’s People, the characters she uses are similar to people of that time outside the novel. In that work she drew a picture of South Africa to expose the social and economic consequences of apartheid, and also to open up utopian opportunities beyond it. An example of how she wrote about these things that were happening in South Africa at the time, “Many of the things which seemed like science fiction then, have begun to happen…” (Erritouni 2) Nadine also shows that the whites have to rethink how they will live in this novel; characters went from living in a seven bedroom house with servants, to living how the black people were living. Gordimer didn’t expect the white’s would readily share the power or property, but some had no choice. Nadine was very quiet, she stayed home and wrote, she very seldom had friends over, and she didn’t go out and do much.
She then wrote during the post-apartheid, “Nadine’s post-apartheid works focus on the lives of white liberals in the transitional time between the release of Nelson Mandela and South Africa’s first multiracial elections.” (Gordimer 3) The two novels on that are None to Accompany me (1994) and The House Gun (1997). These works were about blacks and whites doing things together that they maybe didn’t do during the apartheid times. Gordimer wrote about things that were happening in real life and put them into books so people could have an understanding of what was happening. This may be why some things changed also.
Nadine Gordimer worked very hard on her writing and on trying to change things in South Africa. She wrote many novels on times during the apartheid and post-apartheid; which seemed to change many things also. Learning and writing about Nadine Gordimer was beneficial to me because it taught me what it was like during the time when segregation was intact and also how it changed in the post-apartheid.
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