South Africa's Nobel-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer dies

AFPSouth African Nobel Prize-winning writer and anti-apartheid activist Nadine Gordimer, who became an icon through her unique insights into the country's social agonies, has died at the age of 90. Through 15 novels, several volumes of short stories, non-fiction and other works published in 40 languages around the world, Gordimer eviscerated white-minority rule under the apartheid system and its aftershocks once democracy had been achieved in 1994. The writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, died peacefully in her sleep at her home in Johannesburg on Sunday, her lawyers said. Her reputation rests on a series of novels including "A Guest of Honour", "The Conservationist", "Burger's Daughter", "July's People" and "A Sport of Nature", which the Nobel committee called "magnificent epic writing". "Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations," she once said. The anti-apartheid activist once said it was not truth itself which was beauty, but the hunger for it. Born on November 1923, Gordimer grew up in an affluent suburb of the gold-mining town of Springs, east of Johannesburg. Her mother believed she had a weak heart and often kept her home from school. With time on her hands, she started writing at the age of nine.  She published her first story, "Come Again Tomorrow" in the children's section of a Johannesburg magazine when she was 14.