50 Facts About Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer and political activist.

Nadine Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa.

Nadine Gordimer was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organisation was banned, and gave Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 defence speech at the trial which led to his conviction for life.

Nadine Gordimer was born to Jewish parents near Springs, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg.

Nadine Gordimer was the second daughter of Isidore Gordimer, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant watchmaker from Zagare in Lithuania, and Hannah "Nan" Gordimer, a British Jewish immigrant from London.

Nadine Gordimer's father was raised with an Orthodox Jewish education before immigrating with his family to South Africa at the age of 13.

Nadine Gordimer's mother was from an established family and came to South Africa at the age of 6 with her parents.

Nadine Gordimer's mother was not religiously observant, and mostly assimilated, whereas her father maintained a membership of the local Orthodox synagogue and attended once a year for the Yom Kippur services.

Conversely, Nadine Gordimer saw activism by her mother, whose concern about the poverty and discrimination faced by black people in South Africa led her to found a creche for black children.

Nadine Gordimer witnessed government repression first-hand as a teenager; the police raided her family home, confiscating letters and diaries from a servant's room.

Nadine 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.

Nadine Gordimer's 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.

Nadine Gordimer did not complete her degree, but moved to Johannesburg in 1948, where she lived thereafter.

Nadine Gordimer collected many of these early stories in Face to Face, published in 1949.

Nadine Gordimer, who said she believed the short story was the literary form for our age, continued to publish short stories in the New Yorker and other prominent literary journals.

Nadine Gordimer helped Mandela edit his famous speech "I Am Prepared to Die", given from the defendant's dock at the trial.

Nadine Gordimer had begun to achieve international literary recognition, receiving her first major literary award, the W H Smith Commonwealth Literary Award, in 1961.

Nadine Gordimer responded to this decision in Essential Gesture, pointing out that the board banned two books by black authors at the same time it unbanned her own work.

Nadine Gordimer hid ANC leaders in her own home to aid their escape from arrest by the government, and she said that the proudest day of her life was when she testified at the 1986 Delmas Treason Trial on behalf of 22 South African anti-apartheid activists.

Nadine Gordimer's works began achieving literary recognition early in her career, with her first international recognition in 1961, followed by numerous literary awards throughout the ensuing decades.

Nadine Gordimer's activism was not limited to the struggle against apartheid.

Nadine Gordimer resisted censorship and state control of information, and fostered the literary arts.

Nadine Gordimer refused to let her work be aired by the South African Broadcasting Corporation because it was controlled by the apartheid government.

Nadine Gordimer served on the steering committee of South Africa's Anti-Censorship Action Group.

In 2005, Nadine Gordimer went on lecture tours and spoke on matters of foreign policy and discrimination beyond South Africa.

For instance, in 2005, when Fidel Castro fell ill, Nadine Gordimer joined six other Nobel prize winners in a public letter to the United States warning it not to seek to destabilise Cuba's communist government.

Nadine Gordimer taught at the Massey College of the University of Toronto as a lecturer in 2006.

Nadine Gordimer was a vocal critic of the ANC government's Protection of State Information Bill, publishing a lengthy condemnation in The New York Review of Books in 2012.

Nadine Gordimer spent time with her family in France, as she and Cassirer had bought a small hilltop home near Nice.

In 2008, Nadine Gordimer defended her decision to attend a Jerusalem Writers Conference in Israel.

Nadine Gordimer could be critical of Israel, but rejected comparison of its policies to apartheid in South Africa.

In 2006, Nadine Gordimer was attacked in her home by robbers, sparking outrage in the country.

Nadine Gordimer apparently refused to move into a gated complex, against the advice of some friends.

Nadine Gordimer had granted Roberts interviews and access to her personal papers, with an understanding that she would authorise the biography in return for a right to review the manuscript before publication.

Nadine Gordimer disowned the book, accusing Roberts of breach of trust.

Nadine Gordimer died in her sleep at her Johannesburg home on 13 July 2014 at the age of 90.

Always questioning power relations and truth, Nadine Gordimer tells stories of ordinary people, revealing moral ambiguities and choices.

Nadine Gordimer's characterisation is nuanced, revealed more through the choices her characters make than through their claimed identities and beliefs.

Nadine Gordimer weaves in subtle details within the characters' names.

Nadine Gordimer's first published novel, The Lying Days, takes place in Gordimer's home town of Springs, Transvaal, an East Rand mining town near Johannesburg.

Nadine Gordimer's protagonist, Ann Davis, is married to Boaz Davis, an ethnomusicologist, but in love with Gideon Shibalo, an artist with several failed relationships.

Nadine Gordimer collected the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for A Guest of Honour in 1971 and, in common with a number of winners of this award, she was to go on to win the Booker Prize.

The Booker was awarded to Nadine Gordimer for her 1974 novel, The Conservationist, and was a co-winner with Stanley Middleton's novel Holiday.

Nadine Gordimer described the novel as a "coded homage" to Bram Fischer, the lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists.

Nadine Gordimer's award-winning 2002 novel, The Pickup, considers the issues of displacement, alienation, and immigration; class and economic power; religious faith; and the ability for people to see, and love, across these divides.

New York Times critic JR Ramakrishnan, who noted a similarity with author Mia Alvar, wrote that Nadine Gordimer wrote about "long-suffering spouses and familial enablers of political men" in her fiction.

Nadine Gordimer has occasionally given voice to Jewish characters, rituals and themes in her short stories and novels.

Nadine Gordimer is a Zionist and makes aliyah to Israel.

In 1966, Nadine Gordimer wrote an original story for The Jewish Chronicle.

Nadine Gordimer was nominated for Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972 and 1973 by Swedish Academy member Artur Lundkvist.