Photo: Bengt Oberger (Boberger), CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons · Photograph of Nadine Gordimer at the Goteborg Book Fair on 24 September 2010 (aged 86), taken and uploaded by the Swedish Wikimedia photographer Bengt Oberger (Commons user Boberger) as his own work and released by him under CC BY 3.0 on the Wikimedia Commons file page 'File:Nadine Gordimer 01.JPG' (current version cropped and levels-adjusted by other Commons editors: 1,104 x 1,472 pixels). Rights basis: creator and uploader are the same person; he is an established Commons contributor (account since 2007, more than 15,000 edits, autopatrolled, whose user page describes taking portrait photographs of authors at the Goteborg Book Fair for Wikimedia Sweden); the licence statement is first-party on the file page, with no deletion notice, no conflicting source licence and no institutional claim. Identity is corroborated independently: the fair's organiser, Svenska Massan, listed Gordimer as a guest of the 2010 Africa theme (press release of 1 July 2010; the fair ran 23-26 September 2010), and the Commons file is dated within those days. Limits: I could not independently confirm the photographer's identity beyond the Commons account, EXIF data were stripped from the current version, and no second licensing route (agency or institution) was found; the licence rests on the photographer's own statement. Attribution required: 'Photo: Bengt Oberger, CC BY 3.0'. File used: the current Commons version downscaled from 1,104 x 1,472 to 900 x 1,200 pixels (no upscaling, no further cropping). · CC BY 3.0

writer · 20th Century

Nadine Gordimer

1923–2014

Known For

literarycultural

Wikidata

Not yet included in personality matching — the documented evidence doesn't yet cover enough of the personality model. Everything else on this page is fully available.

Trait Constellation

Key Achievements

A South African novelist and short-story writer whose fiction, written over more than six decades, chronicled the corrosive effects of apartheid on individual lives, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991 for 'magnificent epic writing'.

After her first story collection Face to Face (1949) and first novel The Lying Days (1953), The Conservationist shared the 1974 Booker Prize and was her international breakthrough, followed by Burger's Daughter (1979), July's People (1981) and My Son's Story (1990).

She published 14 novels and 11 story collections by 2005 and a final novel in 2012, with several books banned under apartheid censorship laws, and her work has been translated into 25 languages.

Moments That Reveal Them

Her second novel, A World of Strangers (1958), was banned in South Africa for twelve years, and the Swedish Academy later said she wrote as if censorship did not exist; she kept publishing, and in total four of her works were banned.

This is consistent with continuing to publish despite obstacles to her books. Persistence

Throughout her career she steered between conservative white readers who resented her analyses and committed readers who thought her insistence that art should not become propaganda trivial or indulgent; the Swedish Academy said her texts are not agitatorial or propagandistic.

This is consistent with an independent view of how art relates to polemic, though the stance is also known from her own statements. Independent Thinking

Turning Points

After political change became possible in South Africa around 1990, her manner changed from the neutral, ironic tone of her early work and the committed tone of the 1980s to a more emblematic style, as in None to Accompany Me (1994), and her later fiction took up wider contemporary issues.

This is consistent with adjusting her approach as her subject changed, though critics disagree on how well the later work succeeded. Adaptability