The "Academy of Achievement" brings students face-to-face with extraordinary leaders, visionaries and pioneers who have helped shape our world. Born and raised in South Africa, Nadine Gordimer published her first short story at the age of 15. She left college without a degree and published short fiction in South African journals. She drew attention outside her country in 1951, when her stories appeared in "The New Yorker" magazine. In her short stories and novels such as "Burger's Daughter" and "July's People", she explores the distortions imposed on ordinary relationships by oppressive social systems like that of apartheid in South Africa. Though her fiction was banned by the South African government, 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. She has published 14 novels and 16 separate collections of short stories.