July's People / Burger's Daughter

Nadine Gordimer, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1991, was the preeminent literary chronicler of apartheid South Africa, whose novels anatomize the moral predicaments of white liberal consciousness under a system of institutionalized racial oppression. Works such as July's People and Burger's Daughter confront with unflinching honesty the complicity, guilt, and self-deception that accompany privilege in a profoundly unjust society. Her fiction achieves its power through psychological precision rather than polemic, revealing how apartheid deformed the inner lives of all who lived within its reach.

Gordimer wrote from within apartheid South Africa as an active supporter of the African National Congress at a time when the organization was banned and its members imprisoned or exiled. Her novels document the long arc of the struggle against racial oppression, from the consolidation of apartheid laws in the 1950s through the township uprisings of the 1970s and 1980s to the transition to democracy. The Nobel Prize in 1991, awarded just one year after Nelson Mandela's release from prison, recognized both her literary achievement and her moral courage in bearing witness to one of the twentieth century's great injustices.