Character Catalog

Gordimer's first novel, autobiographical in nature, following the political awakening of a young white woman confronted with the absurdities of segregated South African society.

A novel banned in South Africa for 12 years due to its portrayal of friendly relations between white and black people, a taboo under apartheid.

Co-winner of the Booker Prize, this novel explores the psychology of a white landowner who refuses to acknowledge the inevitable collapse of white power in South Africa.

A masterpiece censored upon publication, it tells the story of the daughter of an imprisoned white communist activist, torn between her own life and her father's political legacy.

A dystopian novel imagining the collapse of the white regime, in which a bourgeois white family finds itself dependent on their former black servant for survival.

Published in the year of the first free elections, this novel examines new identities and the rebuilding of a post-apartheid society, between hope and disillusionment.

Set in democratic South Africa, this novel explores everyday violence and rising crime as the psychological aftermath of decades of apartheid.

"The writer is always seeking what humanity is in its complexity, beyond what society permits to be expressed."

"I am the daughter of Burger. There can be no other definition of myself than that, at this moment of my life."

"Apartheid deformed all of us, White and Black. It created human beings who should never have existed in that form."

"What did she know of him? After fifteen years, he remained at a certain distance — the distance that everything kept between them."

"A writer censored in his own country is not only wounded in his freedom of expression; it is the very reality of his people that is denied."

Mining town where Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923. This community of white settlers living above the gold mines forms the backdrop for her earliest observations on racial segregation.

City where Gordimer spent most of her adult life. The cosmopolitan and segregated metropolis of Johannesburg is the beating heart of most of her novels.

Township where millions of Black South Africans lived under apartheid. Gordimer visited friends and activists there, feeding her literary testimony with the reality of segregation.

City where Gordimer received the Nobel Prize in Literature in December 1991, before an international audience. Her speech emphasised the moral role of the writer in the face of injustice.

Prison island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years. Gordimer, who was close to Mandela, evoked this place in her work as a symbol of resistance to oppression.

Gordimer wrote daily on a typewriter and later on a computer. Writing was for her a daily discipline and an act of political resistance.

Several of her own novels appeared on lists of works censored by the apartheid regime, symbols of the power of literature in the face of oppression.

Gordimer was active within the African National Congress (ANC), Mandela's anti-apartheid movement, at a time when such membership was illegal and dangerous for a white person.

She collected newspaper clippings and police reports on human rights violations, the documentary raw material for her politically engaged novels.

Gordimer kept notebooks of observations on daily life in Johannesburg, recording the social and racial contradictions that fuelled her realist writing.

Received in 1991, this prize recognized a body of work inseparable from the struggle against apartheid, making Gordimer a global voice for human rights.