Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014)

Nadine Gordimer grew up white in South Africa — which meant she grew up inside a system designed to protect her from the truth. She spent her life writing her way out of that protection.

Her novels do not offer the reader a comfortable distance. The white characters in her fiction are complicit, compromised, ordinary. They are not villains. They are people who have chosen not to look — and Gordimer's prose makes looking inevitable.

She understood that colonial power does not only deform the colonised. It deforms the coloniser in quieter, harder-to-name ways. Her characters carry that deformation in the way they speak, the parties they attend, the silences they keep at dinner tables.

She received the Nobel Prize in 1991. The apartheid government had banned several of her books. She kept writing.

Her Nobel Lecture (1991), "Writing and Being", begins: "In the beginning was the Word." She gave it the year apartheid's laws began to fall. Read it at NobelPrize.org.