SOURCE: "Nadine Gordimer: 'I've never left Africa,'" in Progressive, Vol. 56, January, 1992, pp. 30-2.

In the following interview, Gordimer discusses her work and political change in South Africa.

It was a frosty New York autumn afternoon, and Nadine Gordimer, South Africa's pre-eminent novelist, was sitting in the Union Square offices of her American publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Just a week later she would become the first woman in a quarter century to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and the second member of the African National Congress to win any Nobel. (Chief Albert Luthuli won the Peace Prize in 1960.)

Gordimer, sixty-seven, had come to New York to see her grown son, to do some public readings, and to promote her newest book of short stories, Jump. Like most of her fiction, Jump is full of realistic political tales of how apartheid destroys the souls of all who live...