Nadine Gordimer, a white South African, is her country's most famous writer, and in that particular conjunction – of national identity and literary fame – lies the tension which is the determining feature of her career: her position as a consistent, and increasingly radical, critic of apartheid is a position located, to some extent, within the power-group it would challenge. Yet if there is an inevitable (unwanted) complicity for Gordimer as a white, middle-class South African citizen, it is due only to her refusal to exile herself that she has been able to articulate the nature of that complicity, and this is the focus of her extraordinary achievement: her oeuvre – the sequence of novels in particular – comprises the most significant sustained literary response to apartheid extant.

Gordimer was born on 20 November 1923 at Springs near Johannesburg, the daughter of immigrants: her mother, Nan Myers, was born in England, and her father, Isidore Gordimer, was a Jew who emigrated from Lithuania at the age of thirteen. Gordimer was brought up at Springs and attended the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg for one year. Her first marriage was in 1949, and she was married again in 1954 to Reinhold Cassirer.