GORDIMER, NADINE

GORDIMER, NADINE (1923– ), South African novelist, Nobel Prize laureate. Gordimer occupied a preeminent position in South African letters, was internationally acclaimed, and was the first South African writer to receive a Nobel Prize (1991). She was born in Springs, near Johannesburg, and published her first volume of short stories, Face to Face, in 1949. During her long writing career she published over 200 short stories, among the finest in South African writing, and 14 novels. The Lying Days (1953), her first novel, established her as a realist, a genre in which she is best known. Her unerring eye for detail is apparent in all her work, but her realism also charts an inner landscape and constitutes a mirror of the intensity of feeling, suffering, and conflict during the troubled situation under apartheid. Together with her fiction, her numerous essays and studies on culture and politics contribute a general social critique, and all her writing reflects her own commitment to the liberation movement and to social transformation. She has been hailed as a courageous and authoritative voice of conscience during the years of silence and repression, her work sometimes being banned in her own country. A Guest of Honour (1970) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1973. The Conservationist (1974) won the Booker Prize for Fiction. Her numerous other awards include the Modern Language Association Award, the Commonwealth Prize for distinguished service to literature, and the Royal Society of Literature Medal. She insisted that she did not regard herself as a feminist but as a "white African." Many readers and critics are either unaware of her Jewish background or disregard it. She herself asserts that she had no sense of identity with the Jewish community, and that being Jewish has not influenced her thinking or writing in any way. The central character of A Sport of Nature (1987) is a Jewish girl who marries two black revolutionaries, but generally there are few Jewish characters in her work and those are presented in stereotypical fashion. Her vigorous anti-racial stance is not always clearly evident in the presentation of Jewish storekeepers on the mines in her early work. In a story of 1991, "My Father Leaves Home," a Jew (seemingly largely based on the history of her own father, a Lithuanian immigrant) is stigmatized on racial grounds and becomes himself a racist. Perhaps this illustrates her awareness of one facet of the fractured identity of some South African Jews. She continued to chronicle South African life after apartheid. She has been the subject of deep admiration and scrutiny from leading critics and has been translated into several languages, including Hebrew. The intense focus of her vision of the complex and troubled situation of a country beset by seemingly insoluble racial and political problems and gradually undergoing transformation is universally valued. Some detractors see her apparent detachment and coldness as a fault. None, however, deny her immaculate craftsmanship or underestimate her incomparable contribution to South African letters. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: N.T. Bazin and M.D. Seymour (eds.), Conversations with Nadine Gordimer (1990); S. Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (1986); J. Cooke, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives, Public Landscapes (1985); D. Driver et al., Nadine Gordimer: A Bibliography (1993), A.V. Ettin, Betrayals of the Body Politic: The Literary Commitments of Nadine Gordimer (1993); N. Gordimer, "A South African Childhood: Allusions in a Landscape," New Yorker (16 October 1954); S. Gray, Indaba: Interviews with South African Writers (2005); R.F. Haugh, Nadine Gordimer (1974); D. Head, Nadine Gordimer (1994); R.J. Nell, Nadine Gordimer, Novelist and Short Story Writer: A Bibliography of her Works and Selected Literary Criticism (1964); J. Newman, Nadine Gordimer (1988); A.W. Oliphant (ed.), A Writing Life: Celebrating Nadine Gordimer (1998); R. Pettersson, Nadine Gordimer's One Story of a State Apart (1995); R. Smith (ed.), Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer, (1990); P. Stein and R. Jacobson, Sophiatown Speaks (1986); B. Temple-Thurston, Nadine Gordimer Revisited (1999); M. Wade, Nadine Gordimer (1978); K.M. Wagner, Rereading Nadine Gordimer: Text and Subtext in the Novels (1994). (Marcia Leveson (2nd ed.)