Truer than Fiction: Nadine Gordimer Writing Post-Apartheid South Africa

by Karina Magdalena Szczurek

Nadine Gordimer is one of South Africa's most prominent authors. In 1991, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. TRUER THAN FICTION charts this iconic writer's post-apartheid work, focusing primarily, but not exclusively, on the four novels she published between 1994 and 2005: NONE TO ACCOMPANY ME (1994), THE HOUSE GUN (1998), THE PICKUP (2001), and GET A LIFE (2005). The study includes a brief biographical outline of Gordimer's life and a discussion of her long-standing status as 'the voice' of South Africa. It also provides the contemporary socio-historical and literary contexts for her work after the country's first democratic elections in 1994. The core of the study constitutes a thematic assessment of Gordimer's fiction and non- fiction after 1994, explored in the light of these contexts. Drawing upon such schools of thought as postcolonial theory, cultural studies, ecocriticism, feminist criticism and gender studies, as well as the rich critical reception of her writing, TRUER THAN FICTION illuminates the continued importance of Nadine Gordimer's oeuvre in her home country and across the world.

368 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2008

About the author

Karina Magdalena Szczurek is the author and (co)editor of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction. She won the HSS Award for Best Fiction Edited Volume in 2024. She also received the Thomas Pringle Award for a portfolio of ad hoc reviews from the English Academy of Southern Africa in 2018 and won the MML Literature Award in the Category English Drama in 2012. She is a board member of Short Story Day Africa. In 2019, she founded Karavan Press, an independent publishing house, and a year later, she established the Philida Literary Award. She lives in Cape Town.