Gordimer, Nadine - Life

Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer was born to Jewish immigrants in the mining town of Springs near Johannesburg. She was educated at a convent school, then privately at homw, and she began writing quite early, above all about the reality of her own country and a racially divided society.
Since then, she has always been fighting against oppression. During the years of political unrest, she decided to remain in Johannesburg, since the whites considered her a traitor and the black resented the lack of a revolutionary message in her works. Even after Apartheid was dismantled in 1990, she has continued to live and write in South Africa, focusing above all on the people living in a racial society characterized by a cultural clash. She has received many literary prizes and, in 1991, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her best works include July's people (1981) and The Pickup (2001). Like other South African authors, who had found in apartheid a wealth of material for their works and who, in the past-apartheid world, had to look for other sources of inspiration, Gordimer has also had to redefine her subjects.
In The Pickup, for example, she shows that the "new" South Africa still has plenty of target to offer to "oppositional" writers, the main theme of the work being migration from poor Eastern countries to newly democratic South Africa which, through Western - like capitalism and industrialization, has become a kind of "promised land" for hopeless people.