South African novelist whose fifteen novels and more than two hundred stories, written across the whole arc of apartheid from its 1948 imposition to its 1994 end and beyond, constitute the most sustained literary witness any writer gave to the system. Born to Jewish immigrant parents in the gold-mining town of Springs, east of Johannesburg, Gordimer published her first story at fifteen and her first novel (The Lying Days) in 1953. She was there, in and near Johannesburg, for almost the whole of it.
Three of her novels were banned by the apartheid government: The Late Bourgeois World (1966), Burger's Daughter (1979, about the daughter of a Communist activist modeled on Bram Fischer, banned within weeks of publication), and July's People (1981, a near-future novel imagining a white family sheltered by their former servant during a Black revolution). She was a member of the African National Congress from the years it was illegal, testified on behalf of accused anti-apartheid activists, and was one of the first people Nelson Mandela asked to see after his 1990 release. She won the Nobel Prize in 1991.
The work resists the political summary. The Conservationist (1974, Booker Prize) is a modernist masterpiece about a white industrialist whose farm becomes the site of a Black body unburied; A Sport of Nature (1987) is the major experiment with a white woman's complete imaginative crossing; The Pickup (2001) and No Time Like the Present (2012) carry the preoccupations into post-apartheid South Africa, finding the transition no easier a subject than the thing it replaced.