Gordimer, Nadine - nādēnˈ gôrˈdəmər, 1923–, South African writer, b. Springs. She published her first short story at age 15 and later many of her stories appeared in the New Yorker magazine. Her collections include Selected Stories (1976), A Soldier's Embrace (1980), Jump and Other Stories (1991), and Loot and Other Stories (2003). A member of the African National Congress, Gordimer was often militantly critical of South African life in her fiction. She tendered little moral hope for whites who lived under apartheid and fought the system in her political life and her writings. In 1991 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her novels include The Voice of the Serpent (1953), The Late Bourgeois World (1966), A Guest of Honor (1970), The Conservationist (1975, Booker Prize), Burger's Daughter (1979), July's People (1981), My Son's Story (1990), The House Gun (1998), and The Pickup (2001). She has also written many essays, often political or literary; these appear in a number of collections, among them The Essential Gesture (1988), Writing and Being (1995), and Living in Hope and History (1999). In 1998 she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Program's "Decade for the Eradication of Poverty."

See Conversations with Nadine Gordimer (1990), ed. by N. T. Bazin and M. D. Seymour; Writing Life: Celebrating Nadine Gordimer (1998), ed. by D. Goldblatt; studies by J. Cooke (1985), S. Clingman (1986), R. Smith, ed. (1990), K. Kreimeier (1991), B. King, ed. (1993), D. Head (1995), K. Wagner (1994), J. Uraizee (1999), B. Temple-Thurston (1999), and B. J. Uledi Kamanga (2000).

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright© 2004, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.