Nadine Gordimer Biography Quotes 15 Report mistakes

Early Life
Nadine Gordimer was born on 20 November 1923 in Springs, a mining town in the Transvaal, South Africa. Her father, Isidore Gordimer, was a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania who worked as a watchmaker and jeweler; her mother, Hannah (Nan) Myers, came from London. The contradictions of the small, segregated town and the mix of immigrant ambitions and English propriety in her household shaped her early sense of how class, race, and power intersected. A precocious reader, she began writing stories as a child, discovering in literature a way to name the injustices and intimacies of everyday life around her.

Education and First Publications
Gordimer attended a convent school and later took classes for a short time at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the city that became her lifelong home. She devoted herself early to writing and saw her first stories appear while she was still a teenager. In the 1950s she formed a durable professional bond with editors at international journals; her stories began to appear regularly in The New Yorker, a relationship fostered during the long tenure of editor William Shawn. These publications brought her voice to readers far beyond South Africa, even as the country tightened its censorship regime.

Literary Breakthrough
Her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), drew on her experiences of coming of age in a racially stratified society. Through A World of Strangers (1958) and Occasion for Loving (1963), she refined a method that joined intimate relationships to public crises, showing how love, friendship, and desire cannot evade political consequence. The Late Bourgeois World (1966), a short, urgent work, was banned in South Africa for a decade. A Guest of Honour (1970) extended her focus beyond South Africa to the dilemmas of newly independent African states.

Political Engagement and Censorship
The Sharpeville massacre in 1960 and the increasing repression of the apartheid state deepened Gordimer's engagement with politics. She counted among her associates lawyers, activists, and intellectuals who challenged the regime, including Bram Fischer, Ruth First, and Joe Slovo. She supported the African National Congress when it was banned and later became a member. After Nelson Mandela was released from prison, she met with him and publicly endorsed the vision he and Desmond Tutu articulated for a democratic South Africa founded on equality and reconciliation. The state censored her work at several points; Burger's Daughter (1979) and July's People (1981) faced bans and restrictions, a testament to how directly her fiction confronted the legitimacy of apartheid.

Major Works and Themes
Gordimer's novels and stories probe liberal conscience, complicity, and the costs of resistance. The Conservationist (1974), for which she shared the Booker Prize, distills the moral precariousness of white landownership and the illusions of control. Burger's Daughter anatomizes the legacy of political martyrdom for those who live in its shadow. July's People imagines a near-future crisis in which hierarchies are overturned, forcing characters to renegotiate identity and dependence. In later novels such as A Sport of Nature (1987), None to Accompany Me (1994), The House Gun (1998), The Pickup (2001), and No Time Like the Present (2012), she examined the transition from apartheid to democracy, the challenges of law and justice, emigration and belonging, and the private aftermath of public struggle.

Her short fiction, collected in volumes across six decades, is central to her achievement. She was a consummate miniaturist with a global reach: collections like A Soldier's Embrace, Something Out There, Jump and Other Stories, Loot and Other Stories, and Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black trace lives altered by history's pressure, often in a few unsparing pages. Essays in The Essential Gesture and the later selection Telling Times articulate her view that writing is an ethical act, not propaganda but an inquiry into human freedom and accountability.

International Recognition
In 1991 Gordimer received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In her Nobel lecture, Writing and Being, she argued that the writer's task is to journey into the open, where truth is untidy and alive. Long before that honor she had already secured a wide audience; the Booker Prize for The Conservationist in 1974 marked an early international acknowledgment of her craft. Her work was translated widely, and she traveled often to speak about literature, censorship, and human rights. She also mentored and championed younger South African writers across the racial spectrum, including figures such as Es'kia Mphahlele, Andre Brink, and J. M. Coetzee, helping to sustain a literary culture under pressure.

Personal Life
Gordimer married and divorced Gerald Gavron; they had a daughter, Oriane. In 1954 she married Reinhold Cassirer, a German-born art dealer who had fled Nazism, and with him she had a son, Hugo. Cassirer established a leading gallery in Johannesburg and provided a domestic and intellectual partnership that supported her demanding life as a writer and public figure. Their home was a gathering place for artists, scholars, and activists. She remained rooted in Johannesburg throughout her career, refusing exile even when the state banned her work, confiscated manuscripts, or subjected her to surveillance.

Later Years
After the end of apartheid in 1994, Gordimer continued to interrogate the promises and failures of the new order. She engaged publicly with questions of constitutionalism, economic justice, and public health, and she lent her voice to campaigns for freedom of expression. Her late novels demonstrate her belief that history does not end with liberation; it begins anew in the difficult work of living together under law. She kept writing into her late eighties, revising manuscripts at the same desk where, decades earlier, she had crafted stories that appeared week after week in magazines abroad.

Death and Legacy
Nadine Gordimer died on 13 July 2014 in Johannesburg, aged 90. She left an oeuvre that mapped, with rare moral clarity and artistic precision, the passage of South Africa from minority rule to democracy and the afterlife of that passage in ordinary lives. Her fiction endures because it balances witness with complexity: she refused easy heroes or villains, even as she stood publicly against apartheid. The people around her life and work, parents Isidore and Hannah, partners Gerald Gavron and Reinhold Cassirer, children Oriane and Hugo, colleagues like William Shawn, and compatriots in struggle such as Nelson Mandela, Bram Fischer, Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Desmond Tutu, and the writers who shared her commitment to the word, situate her within a web of relationships that made her art possible. Her sentences, spare and exact, remain a record of conscience under pressure and of the possibilities of artistic freedom.

Our collection contains 15 quotes who is written by Nadine, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Writing - Deep.