Nadine Gordimer - Author
Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, South Africa in 1923. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991 and was the joint winner of the Booker Prize for The Conservationist in 1974. Nadine Gordimer has been awarded honorary doctorates from Oxford and Cambridge, is the vice-president of International PEN and a spokesperson for the United Nations Development Project to eradicate poverty.
A co-founder of the Congress of South African Writers, Nadine Gordimer is a strong advocate of literature and free speech. She has also made a number of television documentaries and written a large collection of articles, literary criticism and speeches. She travels extensively in Africa, Europe, and North and South America. Nadine Gordimer died in 2014.
Photograph © Sophie Bassouls
Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 30 May 2010. Nadine Gordimer's life reflects the true spirit of the writer as moral activist, political visionary and literary icon.
April 2011 Guest Editor Lesley Lokko on Nadine Gordimer... One of the first lines of the extraordinary novel, July’s People, by the South African writer goes, ‘You like to have some cup of tea?’ It was the first time I’d ever seen African-accented English in written prose and from that moment on, I was hooked. I grew up in West Africa with a host of accents and languages all around me and I can still recall exactly what it was like to see that world reflected through someone else’s eyes and words. I loved Enid Blyton as a child but Daryl Rivers’ world was a whole galaxy away from mine, and reading Gordimer, aged sixteen, difficult as she sometimes is, sparked a life-long love affair...and is probably the reason I now live in Johannesburg. Books really can and do change your life.
July 2011 Guest Editor Alexander McCall Smith on The Conservationist... This is a gravely beautiful novel with an extraordinarily strong sense of place and time.
In this collection of new stories, Nadine Gordimer crosses the frontiers of politics, memory, sexuality, and love with the fearless insight that is the hallmark of her writing. In the title story, a middle-aged academic who had been an anti-apartheid activist embarks on an unadmitted pursuit of the possibilities for his own racial identity in his great-grandfather's fortune-hunting interlude of living rough on diamond diggings in South Africa, his young wife far away in London. "e;Dreaming of the Dead"e; conjures up a lunch in a New York Chinese restaurant where Susan Sontag and Edward Said return in surprising new avatars as guests in the dream of a loving friend. The historian in "e;History"e; is a parrot who confronts people with the scandalizing voice reproduction of quarrels and clandestine love-talk on which it has eavesdropped. "e;Alternative Endings"e; considers the way writers make arbitrary choices in how to end stories-and offers three, each relating the same situation, but with a different resolution, arrived at by the three senses: sight, sound, and smell.
For years, it has been what is called a "e;deteriorating situation."e; Now it is war. All over South Africa, cities are battlegrounds, and radio and television stations are under siege. Bam and Maureen Smales take up their servant July's suggestion and drive with their children to his remote home village. For fifteen years, July has been the decently treated black servant, totally dependent on them. Now, he becomes their host, their savior, and their keeper. Suddenly facing a hunted life of bare subsistence, owing their survival to July, the Smales are forced to look at him and at one another in an entirely new light. They find life utterly changed and harboring different dread and hope for each individual.
Jessie and Tom Stilwell keep open house. Their code is one of people determined to maintain the integrity of personal relations against the distortions of law and society. The impact on their home of Boaz Davis and his wife Ann, arrived from England, and Gideon Shibalo, the Stilwells' black friend, with whom Ann starts a love affair as her adventure with Africa, is dramatically concurrent with events involving Jessie's strange relationship with her mother and stepfather and her son from a previous marriage. Telling their story against the background of South Africa in the sixties, Nadine Gordimer speaks with unsurpassed subtlety and poignancy of individuals and the society in which they live.
A bold, sweeping story of one girl's rise from obscurity to an unpredictable kind of political power Abandoned by her mother, Hillela is left to be raised by her two aunts in South Africa. At Olga's she might have acquired a taste for antiques and a style of dress to please a suitable husband. At Pauline's she might have developed a social conscience. But Hillela's betrayal of her position as a surrogate daughter so shocks both families that at seventeen she is cast adrift. Swiftly and perilously, her life opens out. She lives as a footloose girl among political exiles on a beach in East Africa, drifting between jobs and lovers, and finally becomes the wife of a black revolutionary. Personal tragedy is ultimately the catalyst for her political development, leading her into a heroic role in the overthrow of apartheid.
Liz Van Den Sandt's ex-husband, Max, an ineffectual rebel, has drowned himself. In prison for a failed act of violence against the government, he had betrayed his colleagues. Now Liz has been asked to perform a direct service for the Black Nationalist movement, at considerable danger to herself. Can she take such a risk in the face of Max's example of the uselessness of such actions? Yet ... how can she not?
Nadine Gordimer is one of our most telling contemporary writers. With each new work, she attacks - with a clear-eyed lack of sentimentality, and an understanding of the darkest depths of the human soul - the inextricable link between personal life and political, communal history. The revelation of this theme in each new work, not only in her homeland South Africa, but the twenty-first century world, is evidence of her literary genius: in the sharpness of her psychological insights, the stark beauty of her language, the complexity of her characters and the difficult choices with which they are faced. In No Time Like the Present, Gordimer brings the reader into the lives of Steven Reed and Jabulile Gumede, a 'mixed' couple, both of whom have been combatants in the struggle for freedom against apartheid. Once clandestine lovers under racist law forbidding sexual relations between white and black, they are now in the new South Africa. The place and time where freedom - the 'better life for all' that was fought for and promised - is being created but also challenged by political and racial tensions, while the hangover of moral ambiguities and the vast and growing gap between affluence and mass poverty, continue to haunt the present. No freedom from personal involvement in these or in the personal intimacy of love. The subject is contemporary, but Gordimer's treatment is timeless. In No Time Like the Present, she shows herself once again a master novelist, at the height of her prodigious powers.
Throughout her career the internationally renowned South African writer Nadine Gordimer has built a literary reputation with her incisive short stories as much as with her acclaimed novels. Together with her essays, this highly imaginative and committed body of work won her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. In the opinion of the Academy: `Through her magnificent epic writing she has - in the words of Alfred Nobel - been of very great benefit to humanity.' Gordimer has said that while novelists take the reader by the hand developing `a consistency of relationship that does not and cannot convey the quality of human life, where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the only thing one can be sure of - the present moment.' Now, for the first time, the best of her stories are published in one volume.
Nadine Gordimer's life reflects the true spirit of the writer as moral activist, political visionary and literary icon. Telling Times collects together all her non-fiction for the first time, spanning more than half a century, from the twilight of colonial rule in South Africa, to the long, brutal fight to overthrow South Africa's apartheid regime and to her leadership role over the last 20 years in confronting the dangers of AIDS, globalisation, and ethnic violence. The range of this book is staggering, from Gordimer's first piece in The New Yorker in 1954, in which she autobiographically traces her emergence as a brilliant, young writer in a racist country, to her pioneering role in recognising the greatest African and European writers of her generation, to her truly, courageous stance in supporting Nelson Mandela and other members of the ANC during their years of imprisonment. Given that Gordimer will never write an autobiography, Telling Times is an important document of twentieth-century social and political history, told through the voice of one of its greatest literary figures.
Mehring, a rich, powerful and vital industrialist, has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer. But his possessions refuse to remain objects: his wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; and even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm. Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, paints a fascinating portrait of a man both reckless and calculating, a "e;conservationist"e; left only with the possibility of self-preservation, in this subtle and detailed study of the forces and relationships that seethed in South Africa.
This rich story collection will be a reminder to Nadine Gordimer's countless admirers, and a taster for the uninitiated, of her enduring imaginative power. A woman gauges the state of her marriage by the tone of her husband's cello; a wife reads her husband's mood by the scent in the nape of his neck; a newly emigrated couple are divided by visual obsession, he with his native Budapest, she with South African suburbia. With consummate artistry, Gordimer illustrates the show downs, standoffs and highlights of human intimacy while penetrating the nuances of immigration, national identity and race.
July 2011 Guest Editor Alexander McCall Smith on The Conservationist... This is a gravely beautiful novel with an extraordinarily strong sense of place and time.
April 2011 Guest Editor Lesley Lokko on Nadine Gordimer... One of the first lines of the extraordinary novel, July’s People, by the South African writer goes, ‘You like to have some cup of tea?’ It was the first time I’d ever seen African-accented English in written prose and from that moment on, I was hooked. I grew up in West Africa with a host of accents and languages all around me and I can still recall exactly what it was like to see that world reflected through someone else’s eyes and words. I loved Enid Blyton as a child but Daryl Rivers’ world was a whole galaxy away from mine, and reading Gordimer, aged sixteen, difficult as she sometimes is, sparked a life-long love affair...and is probably the reason I now live in Johannesburg. Books really can and do change your life.
Paul Bannerman, an ecologist in Africa, believes he controls the trajectory of his life, with the markers of vocation and marriage. But when he's diagnosed with thyroid cancer and prescribed treatment that makes him radioactive and for a period a danger to others, he questions, as Auden wrote, 'What authority gives/ Existence its surprise.' Taken in by his parents, businessman Adrian and successful lawyer Lyndsay, to protect his wife and child from radiation, back in his childhood garden he faces the contradiction between the values of his conservation work and those of his wife, an advertising agency executive. While threat of projects to build a nuclear reactor and drain the country's vital wetlands preoccupy Paul, the strange state of his existence leads his mother to face her own past. With Paul cured and normality apparently returned, his parents take a holiday in Mexico to fulfil the archaeological vocation his father missed. The consequence of this is the final surprise of passionate existences.
Along with making music, the art of storytelling is the oldest form of enchantment as entertainment. The twenty-one stories in this anthology are written in different 'voices' - vividly individual styles - and all have come together to bring the joy of reading to whoever takes up this remarkable collection. All twenty-one writers have given their stories without any fee or royalty. The publishers of each edition in each country where the anthology is published have produced the book without receiving any profit or royalty. Musicians have given their talents for the benefit of the forty million men, women and children infected with HIV and AIDS worldwide. These writers have decided that they too wanted to contribute in some way to the fight against the pandemic disease from which no country, no individual, is safely isolated.
A startling new work from a Nobel prize-winning author: ten short stories, each a revelation of our interior lives, each entering unforeseen contexts of our contemporary world. In the title story an earthquake exposes both an ocean bed strewn with treasure among the dead, and the avarice of the town's survivors. In 'The Diamond Mine' a woman remembers her first, passionately erotic experience, hidden, in the company of her parents, with a soldier who may not be alive to remember her. The anopheles mosquito brings death to the saunas and other playgrounds of the developed with in 'The Emissary'. In 'Karma', Gordimer's inventiveness knows no bounds: in five returns to the earthly life, taking on different ages and genders, a disembodied narrator testifies to unfinished business - critically, wittily - and questions the nature of existence.
In this collection of sixteen stories, Gordimer brings unforgettable characters from every corner of society to life: a child refugee fleeing civil war in Mozambique; a black activist's deserted wife longing for better times; and, a rich safari party indulging themselves while lionesses circle their lodge. Jump is a vivid, disturbing and rewarding portrait of life in South Africa under apartheid.
A schoolboy playing truant bumps into his revered father coming out of the cinema with a woman. An ordinary mishap; but the father is no ordinary man, and the family, threatened by the affair, is no ordinary family. This is a passionate story; love between a man and two women, between father and son, and something even more demanding - a love of freedom. It is a highly intimate drama of personal conflict and public struggle in the evolutionary events that, at great cost to people like these, have brought about change in South Africa.
Masterly new fiction from the recipient of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureA startling new work: ten fictions, each a revelation of our interior lives, each entering unforeseen contexts of our contemporary world. In the title story, an earthquake exposes both an ocean bed strewn with treasure among the dead and the avarice of the town's survivors. In "e;The Diamond Mine,"e; a woman recalls her youthful surreptitious sexual initiation, while she and her parents chauffeured a young soldier to his wartime embarkation. The anopleles mosquito brings death to the saunas and other playgrounds of the developed world in "e;The Emissary."e; "e;Mission Statement"e; is the story of a development agency official's idealism, the ghosts of colonial history, and a love affair with a government official that ends astoundingly. "e;The Generation Gap"e; turns the "e;gap"e; upside down when a father's bid for freedom shocks his adult children. In "e;Homage,"e; one of Europe's aliens visits the grave of the politician he was paid to assassinate. In "e;Karma,"e; Gordimer's inventiveness knows no bounds: in five returns to the earthly life, taking on different ages and genders, a disembodied narrator testifies to unfinished business--critically, wittily--and questions the nature of existence.
Toby Hood, a young Englishman, shuns the politics and the causes his liberal parents passionately support. Living in Johannesburg as a representative of his family's publishing company, Toby moves easily, carelessly, between the complacent wealthy white suburbs and the seething, vibrantly alive black townships. His friends include a wide variety of people, from mining directors to black journalists and musicians, and Toby's colonial-style weekends are often interspersed with clandestine evenings spent in black shanty towns. Toby's friendship with Steven Sithole, a dashing, embittered young African, touches him in ways he never thought possible, and when Steven's own sense of independence from the rules of society leads to tragedy, Toby's life is changed forever.
James Bray, an English colonial administrator who was expelled from a central African nation for siding with its black nationalist leaders, is invited back ten years later to join in the country's independence celebrations. As he witnesses the factionalism and violence that erupt as revolutionary ideals are subverted by ambition and greed, Bray is once again forced to choose sides, a choice that becomes both his triumph and his undoing.
Nadine Gordimer's first novel, published in 1953, tells the story of Helen Shaw, daughter of white middle-class parents in a small gold-mining town in South Africa. As Helen comes of age, so does her awareness grow of the African life around her. Her involvement, as a bohemian student, with young blacks leads her into complex relationships of emotion and action in a culture of dissension.
When Julie Summers' car breaks down in a sleazy street, a young Arab garage mechanic comes to her rescue. Out of this meeting develops a friendship that turns to love. But soon, despite his attempts to make the most of Julie's wealthy connections, Abdu is deported from South Africa and Julie insists on going too - but the couple must marry to make the relationship legitimate in the traditional village which is to be their home. Here, whilst Abdu is dedicated to escaping back to the life he has discovered, Julie finds herself slowly drawn in by the charm of her surroundings and new family, creating an unexpected gulf between them ...'As gripping as a thriller and as felt as a love song' IRISH TIMES
In this work, Nadine Gordimer unfolds the story of a young woman's slowly evolving identity in the turbulent political environment of present-day South Africa. Her father's death in prison leaves Rosa Burger alone to explore the intricacies of what it actually means to be Burger's daughter.
In these stories, selected by Gordimer herself, characters from every corner of society come to life, along with the South African landscape they inhabit. The stories have a strong focus on racial issues, yet their implications are universal. The stories are National Curriculum recommended reading.
Few writers have so consistently taken stock of the society in which they have lived. In a letter to fellow Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe, Nadine Gordimer describes this impressive volume as 'a modest book of some of the non-fiction pieces I've written, a reflection of how I've looked at this century I've lived in.' It is, in fact, an extraordinary collection of essays, articles, appreciations of fellow writers and addresses delivered over four decades, including her Nobel Prize Lecture of 1991. We may examine here Nadine Gordimer's evidence of the inequities of Apartheid as she saw them in 1959, her shocking account of the bans on literature still in effect in the mid-1970s, through to South Africa's emergence in 1994 as a country free at last, a view from the queue on that first day blacks and whites voted together plus updates on subsequent events. Gordimer's canvas is global and her themes wide-ranging. She examines the impact of technology on our expanding world-view, the convergence of the moral and the political in fiction and she reassesses the role of the writer in the world today.
How else can you defend yourself against losing your hi-fi equipment, your TV set and computer, your watch and rings? A house gun, like a house cat; that is a fact of ordinary life in many cities of the world as we come to the end of the twentieth century, especially in South Africa. At this time the successful, respected executive director of an insurance company, Harold, and his doctor wife, Claudia, for whom violence could never be a means of solving personal conflict, are faced with something that could never happen to them: their son has committed murder. What kind of loyalty do a mother and a father owe a son who has committed this unimaginable horror? What have they done, in influencing his character; more ominously, where is it they have failed him? The House Gun is a passionate narrative of love being particularly complex between parents and their children. It moves with the restless pace of living itself, from the intimate to the general condition; if it is a parable of present violence, it is also an affirmation of the will to human reconciliation that starts where it must, between individuals.
This volume is part of a new series of novels, plays and stories at GCSE/Key Stage 4 level, designed to meet the needs of the National Curriculum syllabus. Each text includes an introduction, pre-reading activities, notes and coursework activities. Also provided is a section on the process of writing, often compiled by the author. South Africa is in flames. The battle against white oppression is raging. Forced to flee their comfortable middle-class home, Maureen and Bam and their children seek refuge in the village of their black manservant, July.
