South African Nobel Prize-winning author and anti-apartheid campaigner Nadine Gordimer has died at the age of 90.
Regarded by many as South Africa's leading writer, Gordimer published novels and short stories steeped in the drama of human life and emotion of a society warped by decades of white-minority rule.
Nadine Gordimer, the year before she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Photo: AFP
Many of her stories dealt with the themes of love, hate and friendship under the pressures of the racially segregated system that ended in 1994, when Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first black president.
A member of Mandela's African National Congress (ANC), which was banned under apartheid, Gordimer used her pen to battle against the inequality of white rule for decades, earning her the enmity of sections of the establishment.
Some of her novels, such as A World of Strangers and Burger's Daughter, were banned by the apartheid authorities.
But Gordimer, a petite figure with a crystal-clear gaze, did not restrict her writing to a damning indictment of apartheid. She cut through the web of human hypocrisy and deceit wherever she found it.
"I cannot simply damn apartheid when there is human injustice to be found everywhere else," she told Reuters shortly before winning her Nobel prize.
In later years, she became a vocal campaigner in the HIV/AIDS movement, lobbying and fund-raising on behalf of the Treatment Action Campaign, a group pushing for the South African government to provide free, life-saving drugs to sufferers.
Nor did she shy away from criticising the ANC under current President Jacob Zuma, expressing her opposition to a proposed law which limits the publication of information deemed sensitive by the government.
"The reintroduction of censorship is unthinkable when you think how people suffered to get rid of censorship in all its forms," she said last month.
The ANC responded to her death by describing Gordimer as an "unmatched literary giant whose life's work was our mirror and an unending quest for humanity".
Books banned
The daughter of a Lithuanian Jewish watchmaker, Gordimer started writing in earnest at the age of nine.
A lonely childhood triggered an intense study of the ordinary people around her, especially the customers in her father's jewellery shop and the migrant black workers in her native East Rand outside Johannesburg.
As her talent and reading public grew, her liberal leanings earned her the reputation of a radical.
Eventually the government censors clamped down and banned three of her works in the 1960s and 1970s, despite her growing prestige abroad and her acceptance as one of the foremost authors in the English language.
The first book to be banned was A World of Strangers, the story of an apolitical Briton drifting into friendships with black South Africans and uncovering the schizophrenia of living in segregated Johannesburg in the 1950s.
In 1979, Burger's Daughter was banished from the shelves for its portrayal of a woman's attempt to establish her own identity after her father's death in jail makes him a political hero.
Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.
She died at her Johannesburg home on Sunday evening in the presence of her children, Hugo and Oriane, a family statement said.