Nadine Gordimer — Profile, Rankings & Fame Trend

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

She wrote apartheid's moral reckoning into fiction the regime tried to ban, then lived long enough to see both the system fall and a Nobel committee call her work "of very great benefit to humanity."

Biography

About

Nadine Gordimer was born in South Africa on 20 November 1923 and spent six decades turning the country's racial fractures into literature that refused easy answers. Her novels — The Conservationist, Burger's Daughter, July's People — won the Booker Prize and repeated Central News Agency Literary Awards, but the apartheid government banned some of them for the questions they raised. She joined the African National Congress when membership itself was illegal and helped Nelson Mandela draft the 1964 defence speech that preceded his life sentence. In 1991 the Nobel Prize in Literature arrived, rec…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer

said12 Oct 1984

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

— "The Essential Gesture" (12 October 1984)

Nadine Gordimer

said1984

I think that as long as those of us in South Africa who are articulate are asked to go abroad, and we know we are going to be interviewed, we cannot refuse.

— 1984 interview in Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990)

Nadine Gordimer

said1983

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

— Interview with Jannika Hurwitt, published in Paris Review, 88 (Summer 1983) 82–127; reprinted in Writers at Work: The Paris Review

Nadine Gordimer

said1983

In countries like Czechoslovakia, like South Africa, like Argentina, guilt by association is a fact and therefore the friendships you form can be a political act.

— 1983 interview in Conversations with Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer

said1982