Nadine Gordimer (born 20 November 1923) is a South African writer, political activist and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, when she was recognised as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity".[1]

Gordimer's writing has long dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as July's People were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organization was banned. She has recently been active in HIV/AIDS causes.

Gordimer was born near Springs, Gauteng, an East Randmining town outside Johannesburg, the daughter of Jewish immigrants.

Her father, Isidore Gordimer, was a watchmaker from Lithuania near the Latvian border,[2] and her mother, Hannah "Nan" (Myers) Gordimer, was from London, England
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Gordimer's early interest in racial and economic inequality in South Africa was shaped in part by her parents.

Her father's experience as a Jewish refugee in czarist Russia helped form Gordimer's political identity, but he was neither an activist nor particularly sympathetic toward the experiences of black people under apartheid. Conversely, Gordimer saw activism by her mother, whose concern about the poverty and discrimination faced by black people in South Africa ostensibly led her to found a crèche for black children.

Gordimer was educated at a Catholic convent school, but was largely home-bound as a child because her mother, for "strange reasons of her own," did not put her into school (apparently, she feared that Gordimer had a weak heart).

Home-bound and often isolated, she began writing at an early age, and published her first stories in 1937 at the age of fifteen.[5] 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. At the age of 16, she had her first adult fiction published.[6]
Gordimer studied for a year at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she mixed for the first time with fellow professionals across the color bar. She also became involved in the Sophiatown renaissance.[6] She did not complete her degree, but moved to Johannesburg in 1948, where she has lived ever since. While taking classes in Johannesburg, Gordimer 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",[7] beginning a long relationship, and bringing Gordimer's work to a much larger public. Gordimer, who has said she believes the short story is the literary form for our age,[5] has continued to publish short stories in the New Yorker and other prominent literary journals. Gordimer's first publisher, Lulu Friedman, was the wife of the Parliamentarian Bernard Friedman and it was at their house that Gordimer met other anti-apartheid writers[8]
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"[4] 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, with whom Gordimer has collaborated on at least two documentaries. Hugo Cassirer later married Sarah Buttrick, and had three children: Kate, Roland, and Conrad. Gordimer also has a daughter, Oriane (born 1950), by her first marriage, in 1949 to Gerald Gavron, a local dentist; they were divorced within three years

Nadine Gordimer was born into a well-off family in Springs, Transvaal, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. It was the setting for Gordimer's first novel, The Lying Days (1953). Her father, Isidore Gordimer, was a Jewish jeweler who had emigrated from Lithuania at the age of thirteen. Nan Myers, her mother, was of British descent. Gordimer was educated in a convent school.

She spent a year at Witwaterstrand University, Johannesburg without taking a degree. After an unsuccessful first marriage, Gordimer was married again in 1954 to Reinhold Cassirer, a business man with no literary pretensions. "I never see a thing my wife writes until she's finished," he once said. "I had to wait two years to see A World of Strangers."

Often kept at home by a mother who imagined she had a weak heart, Gordimer began writing from the age of nine. Her first piece of writing was a laudatory poem on President Kruger. Gordimer's first published story, 'Come Again Tomorrow,' appeared in the children's section of the Johannesburg magazine Forum when she was only fourteen. Though she was a slow writer, by her twenties Gordimer had had stories published in many of the local magazines. "It took me years to develop my own style. One week I would try to copy Hemingway after reading him; then I would imitate another writer whose work I admired." (Conversations with Nadine Gordimer, edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour, 1990, p. 4). In 1951 the New Yorker accepted a story, publishing her ever since.

From her early childhood Gordimer witnessed how the white minority increasingly weakened the rights of the black majority. In her first collection of short stories, Face to Face (1949), which is not listed in some of her biographies, Gordimer revealed the psychological consequences of a racially divided society. The novel The Lying Days (1953) was based largely on the author's own life and depicted a white girl, Helen, and her growing disaffection toward the narrow-mindlessness of a small-town life.

Other works in the 1950s and 1960s include A World of Strangers (1958), Occasion for Loving (1963), and The Late Bourgeois World (1966). In these novels Gordimer studied the master-servant relations, spiritual and sexual paranoias of colonialism, and the shallow liberalism of her privileged white compatriots.
Occasion for Loving was concerned with the "line in a statute book" – South Africa's cruel racial law. In the story an illicit love affair between a black man and a white woman ends bitterly. Ann Davis is married to a gentle Jew called Boaz Davis, a dedicated scholar who has travelled all over the country in search of African music. Gideon Shibalo, a talented painter, is black, he has a marriage and several affairs behind. The liberal Mrs Jessie Stilwell is a reluctant hostess to the law-breaking lovers. Boaz, the cuckold, is on the side of the struggling South African black majority, and Ann plays with two men's emotions.

مأزومة.