‘Living in Hope’: an Interview with Nadine Gordimer

Abstract

Sue Kossew spoke to Nadine Gordimer in her home in Johannesburg on 25 January 2001. Nadine Gordimer is the only South African writer to have won a Nobel Prize for Literature. She has been a lifelong fighter for human rights and has championed the cause of political and personal freedom in her native South Africa and abroad. This political dimension has always informed her fiction but, in her Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, she stated that ‘nothing factual I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction’. Her 1998 novel, The House Gun, like other recent novels written by her contemporary novelists, André Brink and J.M. Coetzee, engages with the issue of violence and crime in post-apartheid South Africa as well as with the theme of forgiveness and reconciliation. Her collection of essays, Living in Hope and History, emphasises the need for writers to ‘ask difficult questions’ (quoting Salman Rushdie). Despite the caveat in her Nobel Prize speech, I was interested to find out how Nadine Gordimer was responding to the changes in South Africa since the democratic elections of April 1994.