CAIRO: South African novelist and writer Nadine Gordimer, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, will be delivering the Naguib Mahfouz Memorial lecture at the American University in Cairo on Sunday.
In her speech accepting the Nobel Prize she discusses the role of the writer as “a mutation in the agency of human culture :
“The writer is of service to mankind 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, her and there, in art: trusts the state of being to yield somewhere fragmentary phrases of truth, which is the final word or words, never changed by our stumbling efforts to spell it out and write it down .
Gordimer is a strong advocate of literature and free speech. She has penned 15 novels, 12 short story collections and five works of nonfiction. She currently serves as the vice president of International PEN. As a champion of the disenfranchised she is a spokesperson for the United Nations Development Project to eradicate poverty.
Gordimer, a long-time reader of Mahfouz’s work, wrote the forward for the English edition of the Egyptian author’s “Echoes of an Autobiography. Having attempted to meet him on occasion, she writes, “It doesn’t matter. The essence of a writer’s being is in his work, not the personality.
