Nadine Gordimer

She married Gerald Gavron, a dentist, in 1949. This marriage, though short lived produced a baby girl.

She married Reinhold Cassirer, an art dealer, in 1954 and had a son with him. This union proved to be a happy one and the couple remained together till her husband’s death in 2001.

She died on 13 July 2014, at the age of 90.

She was born in a mining town near Johannesburg to Isidore Gordimer and Hannah Myers. Her father was a Jewish immigrant while her mother was from London. She was raised in a secular environment.

As a young girl she witnessed rampant acts of racism in her neighborhood. She also saw people fighting racism and campaigning for the basic rights of all human beings irrespective of race.

She was enrolled at a Catholic convent school but seldom attended classes as her mother kept her home for most of the time being concerned about her health. She began writing out of boredom at this time.

She published her first story called ‘The Quest for Seen Gold’ in 1937 which appeared in the ‘Children’s Sunday Express’. Her first adult fiction was published when she was 16.

She went to the University of the Witwatersrand where she studied for a year. She dropped her studies and went to Johannesburg in 1948.

While in Johannesburg, she continued to write and had her works published in local South African magazines. She collected many of her writings and published them as ‘Face to Face’ in 1949.

Her story ‘A Watcher of the Dead’ was accepted for publication in the ‘New Yorker’ in 1951. During her initial days she mostly wrote short stories and brought out her first novel, ‘The Lying Days’ in 1953.

Even though she was never interested in politics initially, certain incidents like the arrest of her friend Bettie du Toit and the Sharpeville massacre pushed her to enter the anti-apartheid movement.

Over the 1960s she became active in South African politics and became friends with Nelson Mandela’s defence attorneys. She also helped Mandela in editing his speech ‘I Am Prepared to Die’.

In 1974 she published the novel, ‘The Conservationist’ which is about a rich white man who is dissatisfied with his life. He realizes how alone he is when he witnessed the burial of an unidentified black body and imagines his own funeral.

Her political novel, ‘Burger’s Daughter’ which told the story of white anti-apartheid activists trying to overthrow the South African government, is considered one of her major works.

Another one of her best known works is ‘July’s People’ in which she writes about her predictions on the end of apartheid. The novel is about a fictional civil war in which black South Africans overturn the system of apartheid.