South African novelist and short story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. Most of Nadine Gordimer's works deal with the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. He was a founding member of the South African Writers' Congress and, even at the height of the apartheid regime, never considered going into exile. the claims of natural feelings are overcome in the same way by a line of a code that does not take humanity into account, that recognizes neither love nor respect nor jealousy nor rivalry nor compassion nor hatred - nor any human attitude in which there is black and white together. How Boaz felt about Ann; how Gideon felt about Ann, how Ann felt about Boaz, how she felt about Gideon – everything that was real and grounded in life was empty in the face of the clumsy words that diminished the delicacy and impressive complexity of life to something insignificant. race theory..." (from Occasion for Loving, 1963)Nadine Gordimer was born into a wealthy family in Springs, Transvaal, a mining town on the East Rand outside Johannesburg. It was the setting of Gordimer's first novel, THE LYING DAYS (1953). His father was a Jewish jeweler originally from Latvia and his mother of British origin. From his early childhood Gordimer witnessed how the white minority increasingly undermined the rights of Gordimer was educated at a convent school. She spent a year at Witwaterstrand University in Johannesburg without earning a degree. Often kept at home by a mother who imagined she had a weak heart, Gordimer began writing from age aged nine. His first story, "Come Again Tomorrow", appeared in the children's section of the Johannesburg magazine Forum when he was only fourteen. By the time he was twenty, Gordimer had published short stories in many local magazines. In 1951 the New Yorker accepted a story, publishing it ever since. From his first collection of short stories, FACE TO FACE (1949), which is not listed in some of his biographies, Gordimer revealed the psychological consequences of a racially divided society. . The novel The Lying Days (1953) was based largely on the author's life and depicted a white girl, Helen, and her growing disaffection with the dullness of small-town life. Other works from the 1950s and 1960s include A WORLD OF STRANGERS (1958), OCCASION FOR LOVING (1963) and THE LATE BOURGEOIS WORLD (1966).