S. African Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Nadine Gordimer, whose uncompromising novels and short stories pricked the conscience of white South Africans and angered apartheid governments for nearly four decades, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.

The 67-year-old author of such anti-apartheid classics as “Burger’s Daughter,” “July’s People” and “The Conservationist” was the first woman tapped by the Royal Swedish Academy for the literature prize in 25 years.

“I’m very, very amazed,” she said, reached at her son’s home in New York. And she later told a news conference she will use the prize money, about $1 million, to help struggling black writers in South Africa.

In its citation, the academy said that Gordimer’s “magnificent epic writing has--in the words of Alfred Nobel--been of very great benefit to humanity.”

“Gordimer writes with intense immediacy about the extremely complicated personal and social relationships in her environment,” the academy said in announcing its selection in Stockholm.

It added that Gordimer has managed to be politically involved in her country without permitting that “to encroach on her writings. Nevertheless, her literary works, in giving profound insights into the historical process, help to shape this process.”

Gordimer is the third South African, and the first white from her country, to win a Nobel prize. Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu won the Peace Prize in 1984 and Chief Albert J. Luthuli, the late leader of the African National Congress, also was awarded the Peace Prize, in 1960.

“I couldn’t be in better company,” said Gordimer, who joined the ANC last year.

Ben Mokoena, of the ANC’s arts and culture department, said the award “is great for South Africa and for all democratic writers here. It will certainly encourage young writers.”

Gordimer, perennially spoken of as a leading candidate for the Nobel, said she had given up thoughts of ever winning, telling her agent a day before the prize was announced to “not get too excited” about rumors that she was again on the short list.

Her countryman, the late Alan Paton, author of the acclaimed anti-apartheid novel “Cry, the Beloved Country,” also was frequently mentioned as a Nobel candidate during his lifetime. But he never won.

Gordimer is the second author from sub-Saharan Africa to win the coveted prize, following Wole Soyinka, of Nigeria, the 1986 laureate.

Over the past 40 years, her 10 novels and more than 200 short stories have brought the plight of South Africa’s 28 million blacks to an international audience, earning the gratitude of anti-apartheid activists.

“Nadine deserves the lion’s share of the credit for communicating the full complexity of South Africa,” said playwright Athol Fugard, author of “Master Harold and the Boys” and “The Road to Mecca.” “I’m deeply grateful to her for that.”

Along the way, though, she has drawn the anger of successive white-minority governments in her country. Three of Gordimer’s novels have been banned, only to be unbanned later under international pressure. In the past, her telephone has been tapped and she has been followed by security police.

She modestly dismisses that, though, saying, “One mustn’t have delusions of being important enough to be a danger.”

One of her banned books, “Burger’s Daughter,” published in 1979, explored the life of a young white woman whose father, a doctor, sacrifices his life in the black liberation struggle.

South Africa’s censors complained that the book was “used as a pad from which to launch a blistering and full-scale political attack on the Republic of South Africa, its government racial policies, white privilege, social and political structures, forces for preservation of law and order, black housing and education, the pass laws, etc.

“The negative is stressed,” the censors concluded, “and the positive is ignored.”

That ban was eventually lifted and, in recent years, South Africa’s censors have changed their minds about 1,500 once-banned books.

Braam Coetzee, the current head of the Publications Board, said Thursday that he likes Gordimer’s books.

“They, of course, have a particular political message,” Coetzee said. “But I think she succeeds in bringing out universal truths. She’s a good writer.”

The academy members cited Gordimer for the body of her work, but they singled out four of her novels and two volumes of short stories for special praise. They described “A Guest of Honor,” a 1970 novel about a returning colonial administrator who becomes involved in the conflicts in his country, as a landmark during the first half of her career.

They also lauded “The Conservationist,” in 1974, “Burger’s Daughter” and “July’s People” in 1981, “each of which illustrates . . . personal standpoints in the complicated spiritual and material environment of an Africa in which black consciousness is growing.”

In “July’s People,” one of her best-known works, Gordimer envisions an armed black rebellion in South Africa and follows a white family, the Smales, who flee their fancy suburban home and are sheltered by July, their black “boy,” or houseman, in his rural village. The traditional master-servant relationship in South Africa is turned upside-down by the Smales’ increasing reliance on July.

Her most recent novel, “My Son’s Story,” published in 1990, follows a married black man who is imprisoned for his political beliefs and falls in love with a fellow anti-apartheid activist, a white woman, who visits him in jail.

“The relationship of the lovers is described with great tenderness,” the academy said, even as “the unyielding political reality constantly intrudes.” It described the novel as “ingenious and revealing.”

Although her personal views are strongly anti-apartheid, Gordimer’s works are neither preachy nor polemically political. And she is critical of South African writers who let politics rule their craft.

“It’s important not to become a propagandist, even for the cause that you believe in most,” Gordimer told The Times last year in an interview. “If you’re going to produce anything worthwhile, you must retain the freedom to write about that society, warts and all. You must look at people in all their complexity.”

Karen Lazar, an English teacher at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, sees that as Gordimer’s strength.

“Her paramount commitment is to writing well, to the integrity of the text,” Lazar said. “And if her work is political that is because politics is ubiquitous in her society. It comes to her work of its own accord.”

One critic has described Gordimer’s fiction as “history from the inside,” and Gordimer herself says she picks up where the news bulletins from South Africa have left off.

“Television and newspapers show people’s lives at a certain point,” Gordimer said. “But novels tell you what happened after the riot, what happened when everybody went home.”

Gordimer was the first woman to win a Nobel for literature since 1966, when German-Swedish writer Nelly Sachs shared the award with Israeli author Shmuel Agnon. She is the seventh woman out of the 88 literature prize winners.

The literature award was the first of six Nobel prizes to be announced this month. Nobel Prizes are endowed by the 1896 will of Swedish dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel.