Speaking Volumes: Celebrate the works of this Nobel-winning author at your Manatee library
Born on Nov. 20, 1923, Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer, activist and recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature.
Among many other awards and honors throughout her career, Gordimer also won the Booker Prize in 1974 for her novel “The Conservationist.”
Gordimer’s work spanned several decades and most dealt with race and morality in apartheid South Africa, stemming from her experiences living in Johannesburg.
She became active in the anti-apartheid movement after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, where the South African Police opened fire on a crowd of protesters, killing 69 people and injuring almost 200 others.
From 1949, up until her death in 2014, Gordimer wrote novels, short fiction, plays, essays, and as a confidant of Nelson Mandela, she advised him on his famous 1964 speech at the trial which led to his life conviction.
This month, Gordimer would have celebrated her 95th birthday. Your local library has some of the most famous works by Gordimer.
▪ “Burger’s Daughter” (1979) won Gordimer the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. The novel follows a group of white anti-apartheid activists in 1970’s Johannesburg, South Africa, who hope to overthrow the government.
Shortly after its publication in 1979, the book was banned in South Africa. The reasons for its banishment included “propagating Communist opinions,” “creating a psychosis of revolution and rebellion,” and “making several unbridled attacks against the authority entrusted with the maintenance of law and order and the safety of the state.”
Check out this revolutionary text from your Manatee County Library System.
▪ “My Son’s Story” (1990) chronicles the transformation of a schoolteacher into a revolutionary leader, including his illicit affair with a white human-rights worker.
▪ “The House Gun” (1999) centers around an act of violence, as Gordimer reflects on the post-apartheid society.
▪ “The Pickup” (2001) deals with issues of immigration and discrimination, as a couple leaves South Africa after the man’s illegal status threatens deportation.
▪ Short fiction lovers will enjoy “Life Times: Stories, 1952-2007” (2010), a collection of stories that exemplify Gordimer’s literary genius.
▪ “No Time Like the Present” (2012), her last novel, centers around an interracial couple living in the newly free South Africa. Through the normalcies of their daily, contemporary lives in the suburbs, Gordimer constructs a moving portrait of South Africa as a nation, one that is attempting to redefine itself.
Your local library has many other wonderful works of fiction centered around the tumultuous history of South Africa.
“Hum If You Don’t Know the Words” (2017) by Bianca Marais, and “The Housemaid’s Daughter” (2013) by Barbara Mutch are contemporary novels set in South Africa.
Lovers of nonfiction will appreciate Justine Van Der Leun’s “We Are Not Such Things” (2016), which revisits the 1993 murder of Amy Biehl, a young American anti-apartheid activist and Fulbright scholar, in Cape Town, South Africa.
Kaitlin Crockett is a librarian II and assistant manager at the Palmetto Library. Speaking Volumes, written by Manatee County Public Library System staff members, is published each Sunday in the Bradenton Herald.