Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 – 13 July 2014) was a South African writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognized as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity".Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger's Daughter and July's People were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organization was banned, and gave Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 defence speech at the trial which led to his conviction for life. She was also active in HIV/AIDS causes. Ronald Suresh Roberts published a biography of Gordimer, No Cold Kitchen, in 2006. She had granted Roberts interviews and access to her personal papers, with an understanding that she would authorise the biography in return for a right to review the manuscript before publication. However, Gordimer and Roberts failed to reach an agreement over his account of the illness and death of Gordimer's husband Reinhold Cassirer and an affair Gordimer had in the 1950s, as well as criticism of her views on the Israel–Palestine conflict. Roberts published independently, not as "authorised", and Gordimer disowned the book, accusing Roberts of breach of trust.In addition to those disagreements, Roberts criticises Gordimer's post-apartheid advocacy on behalf of black South Africans, in particular her opposition to the government's handling of the AIDS crisis, as a paternalistic and hypocritical white liberalism. The biography also stated that Gordimer's 1954 New Yorker essay, "A South African Childhood", was not wholly biographical and contained some fabricated events.