Nadine Gordimer (born 20 November 1923) is a South African writer, political activist and Nobel Prize in literature laureate. Her writing has long dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organization was banned. She has recently been active in HIV/AIDS causes … (full long text).
Her 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech.
Dozens of prominent South Africans have signed a statement condemning a racist video which surfaced at the Free State University earlier this month. The list of 81 signatories includes renowned authors Nadine Gordimer and Andre Brink, journalists John Perlman and Max du Preez, retired judge Arthur Chaskalson, cartoonist Zapiro, and academic Phillip Tobias … (full text, March 7, 2008).
Her video: Nadine Gordimer on racism, 3.25 min, 3 Oct 2007;
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Nadine Gordimer – South Africa
The Salon Interview with Nadine Gordimer, not dated.
A team-work video: Superpower Priciples, U.S. Terrorism Against Cuba, by Bernie Fox, 55 min 51 sec – 28 Oct 2006, with the participation of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, William Blum, Leonard Weinglass, Nadine Gordimer, and others … edited by Salim Lamrani, and published by Common Courage Press.
She says: « Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life » (The Guardian).
Cynics may note that this is otherwise pretty familiar territory: The appointment of Suzanne Vega to the judges in 2001 caused some minor consternation at the time, and Nadine Gordimer has also announced that she won’t allow her books to run for the prize. Indeed, today’s headline star AS Byatt first expressed her reservations about the prize back in 1996, its inaugural year … (full text, March 18, 2008).
Her Political and literary activism.
Recently I discovered another writer – novelist and short story writer – whose new works I will await with great excitement and anticipation. That means he joins a short list that includes Ward Just, Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lorrie Moore and Ian McEwen. He is Jim Shepard, and he teaches writing and literature at Williams College … (full text, Feb. 28, 2008).
Amnesty International has pulled the plug on its agreement with Profile Books for its joint series on human rights. The BLOODlikeWATER project was due to be launched at the Edinburgh Book Festival with 30 writers, including J M Coetzee, Paulo Coelho, Tom Stoppard and Nadine Gordimer, due to contribute short stories. Profile was to publish six books in the series, which will now not be part of its 2008 publishing programme … (full text, March 12, 2008).
The video: Charlie Rose (receives 2 Nobel Prize winners: Richard AXEL M.D. (up from the beginning) & Nadine GORDIMER literate laureat (up from 26.33th min), total = 57.34 min, Dec. 8, 2004.
On Sunday afternoon I finished Nadine Gordimer’s third novel Occasion for Loving which she wrote in 1963. I know I tend to go on and on about her but I’ve decided once and for all that I have more respect for her than any other novelist. There are writers who are stylistically more flashy, more daring or who carry you along inside their story with more energy but where Gordimer impresses me again and again is in the way she exposes human thought, emotion and reaction. On nearly every page, in just two or three sentences, she lays open some fact about human existence and as a reader you can’t help but nod your head and say, “yes, that’s exactly what that feels like,” even if its something you may not have experienced on your own. She finds words for the things we don’t even realize there are words for. She’s brilliant. I’m going to write about Occasion for Loving separately sometime this week. (Book review March 25, 2008, scroll down).
Have you ever experienced that brain tingling sensation as you lower yourself, as if into water and become gradually immersed in writing that is so engaging that you wish to savour again and again the feel of the water lapping over you and caressing you. This is my rather humble attempt to describe reading Nadine Gordimer’s first novel published in 1953. Grateful thanks must go to Incurable logophilia for drawing me to read this South African author who had her first story published when she was only 15. Imagine my frustration as I researched this author and found that she had been on Oxford only last year. I missed the author who, in 1991 received the following citation for The Nobel Prize in Literature « who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity » … (Book review March 13, 2008).
Find her and her publications on amazon; on PEN America; on NY Times; on questia.com; on Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Univ. of Texas; on Washington State Univ.; on Nat. Univ. of Signapore; on wikipedia; on Guide to G-manuscripts Univ. of Indiana; on essortment; on Google Video-search; on Google Book-search; on Google inauthor Book-search; on Google Scholar-search; on Google Group-search; on Google Blog-search.
Her Interview with the Independent, Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer, 25 May 2007.
Half a century ago, the prospective Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer contemplated the chances for liberal democracy in Africa. White people would do well to think of themselves as « visitors to a new country », she wrote. Most Africans would prefer « to make their own mistakes than repeat successes (or mistakes) » from abroad … (full text, March 19, 2008).
It is a pleasant coincidence that Sir Vidia’s current visit to Uganda comes at the moment when the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Literature is being announced in Kampala, specifically at Makerere University. Four decades back, African literature was just beginning to buoy itself into international limelight, albeit under diverse constraints. Sure enough, constraints are still there, and will continue to exist. Nonetheless this does not cloud the clear fact that so much has been achieved during this period, and is cause for reasonable pride. Africa for instance now has harvested four Nobel prizes in literature through Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Nadine Gordimer and J.M. … (full text, March 16, 2008).
Her influence waned – which is, I suspect, partly because of her growing disillusionment with the culture she was engaged in. You might not believe it now, but there was a time when you could get very excited indeed about a new film by Jean-Luc Godard; and with Sontag on hand as explicator and cheerleader, one could feel part of a continuum of informed, avant-garde appreciation. Here, though, is how she felt in the last year of her life, 2004, in the first Nadine Gordimer lecture, the final essay in this volume, and the one that gives it its title: « the lesson of the hegemony of the mass media – television, MTV, the internet – is that there is only one culture, that what lies beyond borders everywhere is – or one day will be – just more of the same, with everyone on the planet feeding at the same trough of standardised entertainments and fantasies of eros and violence manufactured in the United States, Japan, wherever; with everyone enlightened by the same open-ended flow of bits of unfiltered (if, in fact, often censored) information and opinion » … (full text, March 15, 2008).
YBlog ZA comments on the disgusting racist video produced by students of the University of the Free State in which Black workers were subjected to eating pissed on food and other horrible acts. Yblog responds to a statement by « among others, Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink, John Perlman, Max du Preez, Arthur Chaskalson, Zapiro and Phillip Tobias. »that states this most never happen again. As Yblog writes, these kind of racist violations and worse happen every day all over the country. Nonetheless I don’t agree that with his submission that they and the media are dehumanizing the whole episode by blowing it out of all proportion. The fact that this kind of racism well any kind exists daily is no reason not to publish and be outraged at this particular incident … (full text, March 13, 2008).
Few relationships are as complex as that between a living author and his biographer. In a startling recent example, Nadine Gordimer — the South African writer who helped bring the world’s attention to the evils of apartheid and won the 1991 Nobel Prize for her efforts – had a bitter falling out with Ronald Suresh Roberts, the young biographer to whom she had granted extraordinary access during his five years of research. Since it appeared last year, Roberts’s biography, “No Cold Kitchen,” has been the talk of literary South Africa. This year it made the non fiction shortlist for the country’s highest literary accolade, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize, eventually losing to two AIDS memoirs … (full text, Dec. 31, 2006).
links:
The Nobel Prize Internet Archive;
Nadine Gordimer (1923- ), South Africa;
She is named in the Encyclopedia Britannica online;
Nobel writer Nadine Gordimer, 82, attacked and robbed, Oct. 29, 2006.