South African Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer, one of the literary world's most powerful voices against apartheid, has died at the age of 90, her family said on Monday. Gordimer died peacefully at her Johannesburg home on Sunday evening in the presence of her children, Hugo and Oriane, a statement from the family said.
Gordimer was a political activist and writer wrote extensively on the social and moral implications of apartheid in South Africa.
A stalwart in the world of literature, she began writing at the age of nine and published her first story at 15. "Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life,’ Gordimer said.
Gordimer was joint winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1974 for her novel The Conservationist. She became active in the African National Congress, an anti-apartheid movement, after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960.
Her 1979 book Burger's Daughter, written during the aftermath of the Soweto uprising, was banned by the South African government along with other books she had written. Despite several attempts to censor her work, Gordimer refused to go into exile. "Art defies defeat by its very existence," she said, "representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it."
In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first woman to win the award in 25 years and the first ever South African to win it. In her acceptance speech, she said, "When I began to write as a very young person in a rigidly racist and inhibited colonial society, I felt, as many others did, that I existed marginally on the edge of the world of ideas, of imagination and beauty."
Gordimer was awarded honorary degrees from several universities, including Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Oxford, Cambridge and the University of York. She was the vice president of International PEN as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She was also the founding member of the Congress of South African Writers.
In 2007, Gordimer was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.
She published her last book, Beethoven was One-sixteenth Black, in 2007.
With inputs from agencies.
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