Born and raised in South Africa, Nadine Gordimer published her first short story in a children's magazine at the age of 15. She left college without a degree and continued publishing short fiction in South African journals. She drew attention outside her country in 1951, when her stories began appearing in The New Yorker magazine. In her short stories and novels such as Burger's Daughter and July's People, she explored the distortions imposed on ordinary human relationships by oppressive social systems like that of apartheid in South Africa. While her fiction was repeatedly banned by the South African government, it received the highest acclaim abroad. She won Britain's most distinguished literary award, the Booker Prize, for her 1974 novel The Conservationist. In 1991 she received the Nobel Prize for Literature. To date, she has published 14 novels and 16 separate collections of short stories, including her latest, Beethoven Was One Sixteenth Black and Other Stories.