On Tuesday in the midst of quickly looking something up in the New York Times, I discovered that Nadine Gordimer had died at age 90. The black and white portrait above was made 25 years ago by a photographer named Chester Higgins Jr. around the time of Gordimer's Nobel Prize.
I read her South African novels, one by one, as they came out in America. I would often recommend her books when people asked me what to read. Like Christa Wolf in East Germany, Nadine Gordimer invented ways to write and publish political fiction of high quality under conditions of heavy government censorship.