Boberger. Photo: Bengt Oberger · CC BY 3.0

Spent her career writing the interior life of apartheid — what it did to the people it privileged as much as those it crushed — in novels including Burger's Daughter and July's People, three of which the South African government banned. Won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. She joined the African National Congress when it was illegal to do so, hid activists in her house, and helped Nelson Mandela draft the speech he gave from the dock at his 1964 trial.