Monday 21 July 2014

Nadine Gordimer: Farewell to Nobel-prize-winning chronicler of apartheid




Gordimer

The literary community on Monday, July 14, 2014, received shocking news of the death of Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer, who died at the age 90.
The South African literary giant until her death was a foremost chronicler of racial apartheid and the subsequent vicissitudes of democracy.
Daily Newswatch gathered that Gordimer’s family said she died peacefully in her sleep at her home in Johannesburg on Sunday.
She was a daughter of a Jewish watchmaker from Latvia and middle-class woman from Britain, Gordimer started writing in earnest at the age of nine and produced 15 novels as well as several volumes of short stories, non-fiction and other works. She was published in 40 languages around the world. Her literary gaze was unsparing on both white minority rule and the governing African National Congress (ANC).
"She cared most deeply about South Africa, its culture, its people, and its ongoing struggle to realise its new democracy," the family said. Her "proudest days", they said, included winning the Nobel prize and testifying in the 1980s on behalf of a group of anti-apartheid activists who had been accused of treason.
During the liberation struggle she praised Nelson Mandela and accepted the decision of his ANC, of which she was a member, to take up arms against the regime. "Having lived here for 65 years, I am well aware for how long black people refrained from violence," she said. "We white people are responsible for it."
Gordimer worked on biographical sketches of Mandela and his co-accused to send overseas to publicise the Rivonia trial in 1963-64. In his autobiography, Mandela wrote of his time in prison: "I tried to read books about South Africa or by South African writers. I read all the unbanned novels of Nadine Gordimer and learned a great deal about the white liberal sensibility." She was among the first people he met on his release in 1990.
More recently she turned her crusading wrath on the ANC itself over proposed secrecy laws that threaten to curb freedom of expression and put journalists and whistleblowers in jail. Three of Gordimer's books had been banned during apartheid. She also remained socially active and was a regular at Johannesburg's Market Theatre until shortly before her death.
As a writer she was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature when she was recognised as a woman 'who through her magnificent epic writing has - the words of Alfred Nobel - been of very great benefit to humanity'. Her principal works include A Guest of Honour, The Conservationist, Burger's Daughter, July's People, A sport of Nature, My Son's Story, None to Accompany Me, Jump, Why Haven't you Written: Selected Stories 1950-1972, The Essential Gesture, On Mines and The Black Interpreters.  

Sources: The Guardian (UK), Wikipedia and Nobel Prize

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