Nadine Gordimer
Overview
 
Nadine Gordimer is a South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

n writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

 and political activist. She was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...

 when she was recognised as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel
Alfred Nobel
Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, innovator, and armaments manufacturer. He is the inventor of dynamite. Nobel also owned Bofors, which he had redirected from its previous role as primarily an iron and steel producer to a major manufacturer of cannon and other armaments...

 – been of very great benefit to humanity".

Her writing has long dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress
African National Congress
The African National Congress is South Africa's governing Africanist political party, supported by its tripartite alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party , since the establishment of non-racial democracy in April 1994. It defines itself as a...

 during the days when the organization was banned.
Discussions
Quotations

The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

"A Bolter and the Invincible Summer" ~ London Magazine (May 1963)

The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.

"Great Problems in the Street," in I Will Still Be Moved (1963) ed. by Marion Friedmann

I opened the telegram and said, "He's dead —" and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say.

The Late Bourgeois World (1966) First lines

Among the group of people waiting at the fortress was a schoolgirl in a brown and yellow uniform holding a green eiderdown quilt and, by the loop at its neck, a red hot-water bottle.

Burger's Daughter (1979) First lines

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, The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, Sixth Series (fall 1979/spring 1980)

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.

"The Essential Gesture" (12 October 1984)

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (1985) ed. Sterling McMurrin

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

"Censorship and its Aftermath" ( June 1990)

You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.

"'A feeling of realistic optimism': An interview with Nadine Gordimer" by Karen Lazar, Salmagundi 113 (Winter 1997)

 
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