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Nadine gordimer (Click to select text)
Nadine Gordimer was born on 20 November 1923 in Springs, a small mining town near Johannesburg in South Africa, which turned out to be the setting for Gordimer's first novel, The Lying Days (1953). Her father was a Jewish jeweler originally from Latvia and her mother of British descent. She was educated in a convent school and she spent a year at Witwaterstrand University, Johannesburg without taking a degree. She has traveled extensively in Africa, Europe, and North America, where she has often. undertaken lecture tours, but has continued to live in Johannesburg; married since 1954 to a businessman, Reinhold Cassirer. The couple has a son and each has a daughter from a previous marriage. She was often kept at home by a mother who imagined she had a weak heart, and began writing from the age of nine; her first work appeared in the Johannesburg magazine Forum when she was fifteen. Her first collection of short stories, Face to Face, was published ten years later in 1949. Her first novel, The Lying Days, appeared in 1953. She has now published 10 novels and 7 collections of short stories, as well as a few volumes of literary criticism and in addition, a large number of articles, speeches and lectures on different subjects. Some of her books have at times been banned in her native country. Since 1948 Gordimer has lived in Johannesburg and taught in the USA in several universities during the 1960s and '70s. She has also written books of non-fiction on South African subjects and made television documentaries. Nadine Gordimer has always aspired to live as a private individual outside the public eye. However her international fame and the many major awards which she has received have made it difficult. She has been continually involved on behalf of literature and free speech in a police state, where censorship and persecution of books and people exist. She won the Booker Prize in 1974 for The Conservationist, and she is one of only nine women to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she did in 1991. She has received honorary doctorates abroad, but declined one in South Africa. She also holds various positions; she is for example, Vice President of International P E.N. She was also a founding member of Congress of South African Writers. She has through much local and international work become known as part of the conscience of South Africa. Gordimer's main themes are exile, loneliness and strong political opposition towards racial segregation. She reveals the effects of alienation of races on society in an unsentimental manner and unique narrative style. In her first novels she studies the master-servant relations characteristic of South African life, spiritual and sexual paranoia of colonialism, and the political responsibilities of privileged white South Africans.
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