Nadine Gordimer

Gordimer grew up in a small South African mining town, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, and left school young after a childhood heart condition kept her largely at home reading. She published her first stories as a teenager and spent the rest of her life in Johannesburg, watching apartheid harden around her and writing against it novel by novel: three of her books, including Burger's Daughter, were banned by the government she never stopped indicting.

July's People, published in 1981, imagined the revolution she believed inevitable finally arriving at a liberal white family's door, upending every certainty of servant and master. She was active for decades in the African National Congress underground, hiding documents and sheltering activists, and testified for the defense at treason trials. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, one of the first major honors to reach South African letters after apartheid's twilight began, and died in Johannesburg in 2014.