20 November 1923
South African author and winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature, Nadine Gordimer, was born in Springs, Transvaal (now known as Gauteng).One of South Africa’s most prolific novelists she has written non-fiction on various South African subjects and made TV documentaries, collaborating with her son Hugo Cassirer on the television film Choosing Justice: Allan Boesak. Godimer was responsible for the script of the 1989 BBC film, Frontiers, and for four of the seven screenplays for a television drama based on her own short stories, entitled The Gordimer Stories 1981-82. Gordimer's subject matter in the past has been the effect of apartheid on the lives of South Africans, the moral and psychological tensions of life in a racially-divided country. She often wrote about apartheid by focusing on oppressed Black characters. The Nobel Prize laureate was an ardent opponent of apartheid and refused to be part of the system, despite growing up in a community in which it was accepted as normal. Her work has therefore served to chart, over a number of years, the changing response to apartheid in South Africa. Gordimer has been awarded fifteen honorary degrees from universities all over the world and she founded the Congress of South African Writers. She has published thirteen novels and ten short story collections (in forty different languages).
References
The Nobel Foundation (1991), ‘The Nobel Prize in Literature 1991 ”“ Nadine Gordimer’, from Nobel Prize.org [online]. Available at www.nobelprize.org [Accessed 24 October 2011]|British Council (2011). ‘Nadine Gordimer’from British Council: Literature [online]. Available at www.britishcouncil.org [Accessed 24 October 2011]|Petri Liukkonen (2008). ‘Nadine Gordimer (1923)from Kirjstor: Books and Writers [online]. Available at www.kirjstor.sci.fi [Accessed 24 October 2011]