Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) was born in and lived all her life in South Africa, drawing inspiration for her novels and short stories from what she called “the tragedy of [her] own particular place.” Gordimer studied master-servant relations characteristic of South African life, spiritual and sexual paranoia of colonialism, and the shallow liberalism of the privileged white class.

Gordimer’s novel The Pickup, published in 2002, depicts the challenges of a relationship between the daughter of a wealthy investment banker and an Arab auto mechanic who is an illegal immigrant. A winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, she received numerous honorary degrees from universities all over the world.