Nadine gordimer family

Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, Transvaal (now Gauteng), an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg in 1923. Her father, Isidore Gordimer, was a Jewish jeweller originally from Latvia and her mother, Nan Myers, was of British descent.

From her early childhood, Gordimer witnessed how the White minority increasingly weakened the few rights of the Black majority.

Gordimer was educated at a convent school and began writing at the young age of nine; her first short story was published when she was fifteen in the liberal Johannesburg magazine, Forum.

She later spent a year at Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg without receiving a degree. In 1948, she moved to Johannesburg where she lived most of her life. Gordimer has been awarded 10 honorary doctorates in literature from various universities around the world.

She grew up reading the great realists of 19th- and early 20th-century fiction, and later would continue to cite the Russians in particular (Tolstoy