It’s the birthday of South African author and Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, #nicelonglife), who never set out to be a political writer but whose novels helped expose the horrors of apartheid.

Gordimer was born in the mining town of Springs in northeastern South Africa, near Johannesburg and Pretoria. Her parents were both Jewish immigrants but her father was from Lithuania and her mother from Britain. They had an unhappy marriage, and Gordimer’s mother made a great deal out of Gordimer supposedly having delicate health, even pulling her out of school and keeping her out of sports. Gordimer later realized that her unhappy mother had a crush on the family doctor, and unconsciously used her daughter as an excuse to have a lot of contact with him. Thus isolated because of her mother, Gordimer did a great deal of reading and starting writing stories at a young age.

Gordimer went to the University of Witwatersrand for just one year. Her first collection of short stories, Face to Face, was published in 1949, one year after the apartheid era began; her first New Yorker story, “The Watcher of the Dead,” was published in 1951 and began a long association with that magazine that brought her international attention. Gordimer’s first novel, The Lying Days, was published in 1953 and was semi-autobiographical. She published several more novels and in 1974 won the Booker Prize for The Conservationist, about a rich white businessman who buys a farm on which later a black man is found dead. Her novel Burger’s Daughter (1979) was her third novel to be banned in South Africa, though this one only briefly; it tells the story of a woman whose father was a martyr to the anti-apartheid cause. July’s People (1981) is about a black servant, July, who ends up protecting his white employers when the government is overthrown. I could list many more but they just keep sounding interesting so let’s skip to her last novel, No Time like the Present (2012), which is about a mixed-race couple coping with various difficulties in post-apartheid South Africa.

Gordimer was very private about her personal life. She married for the first time in 1949, had a daughter, then divorced in 1952. She was married to her second husband, the South African Sotheby art dealer Reinhold Cassirer, from 1954 until his death in 2001; they had a son. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991 just as apartheid was being dismantled, so kind of a good couple of years there. (On a completely unrelated note, I just realized how boring my family Christmas letter is going to be this year.)

Enjoy the cold and the snow and the deer bounding across the yard on this fine Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.