She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organisation was banned, and gave Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 defence speech at the trial which led to his conviction for life.

[2][7] Her mother was not religiously observant, and mostly assimilated, whereas her father maintained a membership of the local Orthodox synagogue and attended once a year for the Yom Kippur services.

[5] Gordimer also witnessed government repression first-hand as a teenager; the police raided her family home, confiscating letters and diaries from a servant's room.

[5] Thereafter, she quickly became active in South African politics, and was close friends with Nelson Mandela's defence attorneys (Bram Fischer and George Bizos) during his 1962 trial.

[5] During the 1960s and 1970s, she continued to live in Johannesburg, although she occasionally left for short periods of time to teach at several universities in the United States.

Throughout this time, Gordimer continued to demand through both her writing and her activism that South Africa re-examine and replace its long-held policy of apartheid.

The Publications Committee's Appeal Board reversed the censorship of Burger's Daughter three months later, determining that the book was too one-sided to be subversive.

[20] Gordimer responded to this decision in Essential Gesture (1988), pointing out that the board banned two books by black authors at the same time it unbanned her own work.

[5] She hid ANC leaders in her own home to aid their escape from arrest by the government, and she said that the proudest day of her life was when she testified at the 1986 Delmas Treason Trial on behalf of 22 South African anti-apartheid activists.

Literary recognition for her accomplishments culminated with the Nobel Prize for Literature on 3 October 1991,[27] which noted that Gordimer "through her magnificent epic writing has—in the words of Alfred Nobel—been of very great benefit to humanity".

In 2004, she organised about 20 major writers to contribute short fiction for Telling Tales, a fundraising book for South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, which lobbies for government funding for HIV/AIDS prevention and care.

For instance, in 2005, when Fidel Castro fell ill, Gordimer joined six other Nobel prize winners in a public letter to the United States warning it not to seek to destabilise Cuba's communist government.

[33] She was a vocal critic of the ANC government's Protection of State Information Bill, publishing a lengthy condemnation in The New York Review of Books in 2012.

[43][44] Although her children and grandchildren lived overseas and friends had emigrated, she had no plans to leave South Africa permanently: "It's always been a nightmare in my mind, to be cut off.

She had granted Roberts interviews and access to her personal papers, with an understanding that she would authorise the biography in return for a right to review the manuscript before publication.

[46][47][48] Gordimer achieved lasting international recognition for her works, most of which deal with political issues, as well as the "moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country.

Always questioning power relations and truth, Gordimer tells stories of ordinary people, revealing moral ambiguities and choices.

Arguably a semi-autobiographical work, The Lying Days is a Bildungsroman, charting the growing political awareness of a young white woman, Helen, toward small-town life and South African racial division.

[5] Thematically covering the same ground as Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country (1977), the "conservationist" seeks to conserve nature to preserve the apartheid system, keeping change at bay.

[citation needed] Gordimer's 1979 novel Burger's Daughter is the story of a woman analysing her relationship with her father, a martyr to the anti-apartheid movement.

Gordimer described the novel as a "coded homage" to Bram Fischer, the lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists.

[53][54][55] Gordimer's award-winning 2002 novel, The Pickup, considers the issues of displacement, alienation, and immigration; class and economic power; religious faith; and the ability for people to see, and love, across these divides.

It tells the story of a couple: Julie Summers, a white woman from a financially secure family, and Abdu, an illegal Arab immigrant in South Africa.

But he is at the same time undergoing radiation therapy for his cancer, causing him personal grief and, ironically, rendering him a nuclear health hazard in his own home.

It's impossible to guess from the books alone that Gordimer was Jewish; and it would be easy to assume the contrary, since whenever Jews do appear in her fiction, they tend to be seen through the eyes of a non-Jew, looking in with almost anthropological fascination onto an alien culture.

"[65] In her debut novel The Lying Days (1953), a major character, Joel Aaron, son of a working class Jewish shopkeeper, acts as a voice of conscience.

His ethical stances and sense of Jewish identity and ancestry impresses his non-Jewish white middle-class friend, Helen: "His nature had for mine the peculiar charm of the courage to be itself without defiance.

[67] In A World of Strangers (1958), there is less Jewish character development, with only a reference to an older man at a party with a thick Eastern European accent with an attractive blonde spouse.

According to Wade: "The story's ending indicates that Gordimer has not yet broken through the wool-and-iron barriers of confusion and conflict aroused by the question of her Jewish identity.

[63] Wade concluded: "By writing A Sport of Nature in the transcendent style she chose, she tried again to give meaning to her personal muddle over Jewish identity and experience, this time by creating Hillela, whose name represents the deepest moral and prophetic tradition in Jewish history, and who, united with Reuel (=Jethro), the great (not-Jewish) guide and adviser of the beginnings of that history, is able to resolve the inherent contradictions of (the writer's?)