Biography of nadine gordimer
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Nadine Gordimer
You were born into a very particular society. Can you tell us a little about your childhood? Where were you born?
Nadine Gordimer: I was born in a little gold mining town called Springs. There was no spring around, I don’t know why it was called that, and I spent my school days there. I grew up there.
Did you have any siblings?
Nadine Gordimer: Yes, I had one sister. My mother went to a dancing exhibition of some friend of hers who was a dancing teacher. There was a little girl there who danced beautifully and who was called Nadine. She was pregnant and she decided that if she had a daughter again — because my older sister was already there — she would call her Nadine. So that’s how I got my name.
Could you tell us about your parents, Isidore and Nan?
Nadine Gordimer: Well, Nan was my mother and she came from England as a child with her parents. My father came from Latvia, from some tiny little village somewhere. So they came from very differe
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Nadine Gordimer
South African writer (1923–2014)
Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 – 13 July 2014) was a South African writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognised as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity".[1]
Gordimer was one of the most honored female writers of her generation. She received the Booker Prize for The Conservationist, and the Central News Agency Literary Award for The Conservationist, Burger's Daughter and July's People.
Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger's Daughter were banned. She 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
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Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, Transvaal (now Gauteng), an East kant mining town outside Johannesburg in 1923. Her father, Isidore Gordimer, was a Jewish jeweller originally from Latvia and her mother, Nan Myers, was of British nedstigning. From her early childhood, Gordimer witnessed how the White minority increasingly weakened the few rights of the Black majority.
Gordimer was educated at a convent school and began writing at the young age of nine; her first short story was published when she was fifteen in the liberal Johannesburg magazine, Forum. She later spent a year at Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg without receiving a degree. In 1948, she moved to Johannesburg where she lived most of her life. Gordimer has been awarded 10 honorary doctorates in literature from various universities around the world.
She grew up reading the great realists of 19th- and early 20th-century fiction, and later would continue to cite the Russians in particular (Tolstoy