Despite their different paths, both authors won the Nobel prize in literature and both faced the challenge of what to write after apartheid. Both have remained writers first but also, in different ways, the troubled conscience of their country.

Coetzee said on Tuesday: "As a writer and as a human being, Nadine Gordimer responded with exemplary courage and creative energy to the great challenge of her times, the system of apartheid unjustly imposed and heartlessly implemented on the South African people. Looking to the great realist novelists of the 19th century as models, she produced a body of work in which the South Africa of the late 20th century is indelibly recorded for all time."

While Coetzee received some criticism for ‘‘running away’’ from the new South Africa, the activist Gordimer had the strange experience of being retrospectively accused of paternalism and racism in some of her earlier works.

It is arguable that both authors' best work emerged from the struggle against apartheid. In a review of Gordimer’s 1998 novel The House Gun, Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times that the author ‘‘has yet to come to terms, artistically, with the dismantling of apartheid and her country's drastically altered social landscape’’.

Like Coetzee, Gordimer continued to be interested with the complexities of race, power and personal relations. There were some tepid reviews of her 2002 novel, The Pickup, about the connection between a young, white South African woman and an illegal Arab immigrant. But Martin Armiger’s review for the Herald called it ‘‘a glorious book. I would call it masterly were not the word so flagrant with the very politics that Gordimer is unravelling’’.