SA writer, Nadine Gordimer, wins Nobel Prize for Literature

South African writer Nadine Gordimer won the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature. She was the first woman in 25 years to be awarded the honour and the seventh woman laureate in the near-century history of the Nobel Prize. Gordimer is the author of ten novels and more than 200 short stories; her work over the past forty years has insistently and increasingly focused upon the legacies and moral consequences of apartheid. Heralded as well as banned in her native country, Gordimer has consistently refused to leave South Africa. By addressing its political and racial turmoil in her fiction, she has chosen a spiritual exile over an actual one. In announcing its selection to the press, the Academy praised Gordimer for her magnificent epic writing, her compassion and her outstanding literary style.