While she did not originally choose apartheid as her subject as a young writer, Gordimer said she found it impossible to dig deeply into South African life without striking repression. And once the Afrikaner nationalists came to power in 1948, the scaffolds of the apartheid system began to rise around her and could not be ignored.

"I am not a political person by nature," she once said. "I don't suppose, if I had lived elsewhere, my writing would have reflected politics much, if at all."

But whether by accident of geography or literary searching, Gordimer found her themes in the injustices and cruelties of her country's policies of racial division and she left no quarter of South African society unexplored – from the hot, crowded cinder-block neighbourhoods and tiny shebeens of the black townships to the poolside barbecues, hunting parties and sundowner cocktails of the white society.

Through her work, international readers learned the human effects of the "colour bar" and the punishing laws that systematically sealed off each avenue of contact among races.

In her stories, the fear of the security forces pounding on the door in the middle of the night is real. Freedom is impossible; even the liberated political prisoner is immediately rearrested after experiencing the briefest illusion of returning to the world.

Critics have described the whole of her work as constituting a social history as told through finely drawn portraits of the characters who peopled it. About her own life Gordimer told little, preferring to explore the intricacies of the mind and heart in those of her protagonists. "It is the significance of detail wherein the truth lies," she said.

But some critics saw in her fiction a theme of personal as well as political liberation, reflecting her struggles growing up under the possessive, controlling watch of a mother trapped in an unhappy marriage.

Gordimer was the author of more than two dozen works of fiction, including novels and collections of short stories in addition to personal and political essays and literary criticism. Her first book of stories, Face to Face, appeared in 1949, and her first novel, The Lying Days, in 1953. In 2010, she published Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008, a weighty volume of her collected non-fiction.

Three of Gordimer's books were banned in her own country at some point during the apartheid era – 1948 to 1994 – starting with A World of Strangers (1958) then The Late Bourgeois World (1966) and Burger's Daughter (1979)

She won the Booker Prize in 1974 for The Conservationist. Long before the struggle against apartheid was won, some of her books looked ahead to its overthrow and a painful national rebirth. In July's People (1981), a violent war for equality has come to the white suburbs, driving out the ruling minority.

Perhaps surprisingly, Gordimer's books were not the product of someone who had grown up in a household where the politics of race were discussed. Rather, she said, in her world, the minority whites lived among blacks "as people live in a forest among trees".

It was not her country's problems that set her to writing, she said. "On the contrary," she wrote in an essay, "it was learning to write that sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life."

Nadine Gordimer was born to Jewish immigrant parents on November 20, 1923, in Springs, a mining town in a vast, largely rural area in the north-east now known as Gauteng (formerly part of the Transvaal).

In 1945, she attended in the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and thrived in what she called the "nursery bohemia" of university life, studying literature and deciding to pursue a writing life.

In 1949, Gordimer married a dentist, Gerald Gavron. After divorcing, she married Reinhold H. Cassirer, an art dealer who had fled Nazi Germany. Her daughter and son from these marriages survive her.

Gordimer said little about her personal life in interviews. Journalists commonly noted her impatience with certain personal questions, sometimes describing her response as disdainful and irritable.

She did mention flirtations on occasion. "My one preoccupation outside the world of ideas was men," she once said, without providing details.

When the Nobel committee awarded Gordimer the literature prize in 1991, it took note of her political activism but observed, "she does not permit this to encroach on her writings".

She never stopped grappling with politics, despite her disdain for the polemical. And book by book, she crept closer to reconciling her writing with her political self. What she did not want to do, she said, was to write in the service of the anti-apartheid movement, despite her deep contempt for the government system.

Over time, she revealed that she had been far from passive when politics touched her personally. She passed messages; hid friends, including high-ranking figures, who were trying to elude the police; and secretly drove others to the border. All these actions appear in her fiction, carried out by characters much braver than she portrayed herself to be.

During that exhilarating period, when Nelson Mandela's African National Congress party regained legal standing, Gordimer, who had been a secret member, paid her dues in person and got a party card. It was after the release of the man who would be president within a few years that Gordimer won the Nobel Prize. "Mandela still doesn't have a vote," she said at the time.

Gordimer went on writing after apartheid, resisting the idea that its demise had deprived her of her great literary subject. It "makes a big difference in my life as a human being," she said, "but it doesn't really affect me in terms of my work, because it wasn't apartheid that made me a writer, and it isn't the end of apartheid that's going to stop me."

While there were critics who thought she had lost her bearings, she continued to write prolifically for years after apartheid became history. Politically, she eventually embraced other causes, among them the fight against the spread of the HIV virus and AIDS in South Africa and a writers' campaign against the country's punishing secrecy law.

New York Times