"The writer is of service to humankind only insofar as the writer uses the word even against his or her own loyalties, trusts the state of being, as it is revealed, to hold somewhere in its complexity filaments of the cord of truth, able to be bound together, here and there, in art: trusts the state of being to yield somewhere fragmentary phrases of truth, which is the final word of words, never changed by our stumbling efforts to spell it out and write it down, never changed by lies, by semantic sophistry, by the dirtying of the word for the purposes of racism, sexism, prejudice, domination, the glorification of destruction, the curses and the praise-songs."
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Booker Prize winnersJewish atheistsWomen academics from South AfricaNovelists from South AfricaJews from South Africa
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Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 – 13 July 2014) was a South African Jewish novelist and writer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in literature and 1974 Booker Prize.*, recognized as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity".
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