Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer grew up in Springs, a mining town on the East Rand, the daughter of a Jewish watchmaker from Lithuania and a mother born in London. Kept largely at home as a girl, she read widely and began writing early; her first story appeared when she was thirteen. A year at the University of the Witwatersrand brought her into mixed company across the colour bar, and in 1948 she settled in Johannesburg, the city that would remain her home.

Her early collections and her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), established a writer of close social observation, alert to what people conceal from themselves. Over the following decades the novels widened and darkened: The Conservationist, which shared the Booker Prize in 1974, read white ownership of the land as a form of blindness, while Burger’s Daughter and July’s People examined political inheritance and imagined the collapse of the old order. Several of her books were banned in South Africa. She joined the African National Congress while it was still outlawed and was consulted by Nelson Mandela on the speech he gave at the Rivonia trial.

The Swedish Academy honoured her in 1991, the year apartheid’s legal scaffolding was being dismantled. She went on writing into the democratic era, turning to migration, crime and the moral compromises of the new state in books such as The Pickup, and campaigned on HIV/AIDS and censorship. She died in Johannesburg in 2014, leaving a body of fiction that serves as one of the fullest records of a society under pressure.