Gordimer, Nadine (1923–)

South African writer. Born in Springs, Transvaal, South Africa, Nov 20, 1923; dau. of Isidore Gordimer (Jewish shopkeeper from Lithuania) and Nan (Myers) Gordimer (dau. of a Jewish family from England); attended the University of the Witwatersrand, 1945; m. Gerald Gavron (Gavronsky), Mar 6, 1949 (div. 1952); m. Reinhold Cassirer, Jan 29, 1954; children: (1st m.) one daughter, Oriane Gavron; (2nd m.) one son, Hugo Cassirer.

Nobel-prize winner and one of South Africa's leading writers, who has devoted much of her career to exploring the complex personal undercurrents in her country's political and racial history in the 2nd half of the 20th century; published 1st story (1939); published 1st collection of short stories, The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952); published 1st novel, The Lying Days, and made 1st trip abroad (1953); saw paperback edition of A World of Strangers banned in South Africa (1962), as well as The Late Bourgeois World (1971) and The Burger's Daughter (1979); participated in defense of Alexandra Township (1986); joined African National Congress (1990); delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University (1994); wrote more than 200 short stories and 11 novels, including Face to Face (1949), Occasion for Loving (1963), Livingston's Companions (1971), July's People (1981), A Sport of Nature (1987), My Son's Story (1990), Jump and Other Stories (1991), None to Accompany Me (1994), The House Gun (1998), (collection of essays and lectures) Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century (1999); presented a vivid and profound picture of sensitive members of the white community in South Africa living in a segregated society that does violence to their moral principles. Won Booker Prize for her novel The Conservationist (1974); won Nobel Prize for Literature (1991).

See also Robert F. Haugh, Nadine Gordimer (Twayne, 1974); Dominic Head, Nadine Gordimer (Cambridge University Press, 1994); Kathrin Wagner, Rereading Nadine Gordimer (Indiana University Press, 1994); Judie Newman, Nadine Gordimer (Routledge, 1988); and Women in World History.