Almanac of Story Tellers: Nadine Gordimer

 Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of Nov. 20th

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    It is the 324th day of the year, leaving 41 days remaining in 2022.

 

  On this date in 1923, the anti-apartheid writer Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, South Africa.

    She wrote her stories about the  people in South Africa struggling against the chains of apartheid -- and the tension between isolation and the commitment to social justice. She wrote in clear and controlled terms about the helplessness caused by the reality of apartheid, coupled with the inability to change it or accept exile. None was acceptable in her eyes.

    The statement accompanying her Nobel Prize in Literation, awarded for her body of work in 1991, said her literature "create(s) rich imagery of South Africa's historical development."

    She was born into a privileged middle-class background, started writing early, and sold her first story when she was 15. She continued to examine her home country, and learned from her extensive reading the horrors of apartheid. In 1951, she published Watching the Dead, a short story, in the New Yorker. Her first two books were collections of short stories,

    Her first novel, Lying Days, was published in 1953. A semi-autobiographical tale, it tells of a young women who grew up in a mining town in South Africa, who slowly sheds her naivete of the world around her. A 1963 novel, Occasion for Loving, explored an interracial romance, then illegal in the country. 

 

   In 1974, she won the Booker Prize for The Conservationist, a novel that combined Zulu culture with the tale of a powerful and oppressive white industrialist who wants to take up farming in the country.

    Gordimer became an activist against apartheid, through her writings and her activity in politics. She became friends with Nelson Mandela, worked on his defense during his trial in 1962, helping him write his "I am Prepared to Die" speech. When Mandela was released in 1990, she was there to see him leave prison.

    Several of her works were banned in her home country. Among them were Burger's Daughter, July's People, and A World of Strangers, which explicitly attacked apartheid and was banned upon publication in 1958 for a dozen years.

    Gordimer died in 2014 in Johannesburg.