The Conservationist

Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer was a South African novelist and short-story writer whose career was closely engaged with the moral and political life of her country. Her fiction returns persistently to apartheid, race, love, and the unequal distribution of power, but approaches these subjects through the pressures they place on ordinary lives rather than through simple declarations. Gordimer’s characters are often defined less by stated convictions than by choices made under strain, a method that allows political conflict and private attachment to expose each other’s compromises. July’s People reverses the familiar social order by making a white family dependent on their former Black servant after apartheid’s collapse, while Burger’s Daughter examines the burden of inheriting a family’s revolutionary commitments. Across such work, dense, sometimes lyrical prose and close attention to relationships sustain an alertness to ambiguity. Her political engagement also had direct consequences: Burger’s Daughter was banned under apartheid.