Gordimer, anti-apartheid author dies at 90

One of the world’s most powerful voices against apartheid, Nadine Gordimer is dead, Reuters reports.

The South African Nobel Prize-winning author died at the age of 90. Her family, confirming the news, said she died peacefully at her Johannesburg home on Sunday evening in the presence of her children, Hugo and Oriane,

A statement from her family read: "She cared most deeply about South Africa, its culture, its people and its on-going struggle to realize its new democracy," the statement said.  

Gordimer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, was renowned moralist and her stories explored issues that surrounded the pressures of the racially segregated system that ended in 1994, when Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first black president.

She was a member of Mandela's African National Congress (ANC).

Some of her novels, such as “"A World of Strangers" and a "“Burger's Daughter", were banned by the apartheid authorities but she did not back down as she went ahead to write damning indictment of apartheid, cutting through the web of human hypocrisy and deceit wherever she found it.

She was also a vocal campaigner in the HIV/AIDS movement that lobbied for for the South African government to provide free, life-saving drugs to sufferers.

When recently, President Jacob Zuma’s administration proposed a law restricting the publication of material considered sensitive to the government, Gordimer spoke out against it, saying: "The reintroduction of censorship is unthinkable when you think how people suffered to get rid of censorship in all its forms,"