For many readers, the value of an “authorized biography” is dubious. The suspicion is that the work will be a servile and selective record of the subject’s life, minus even the bonus of close access that a first-person memoir provides. This Guardian story will do little to debunk that view: South African literary giant Nadine Gordimer has blocked a long-in-the-works biography over what the author calls “weird vanity stuff.”

Ronald Suresh Roberts had planned to publish his Gordimer bio with Bloomsbury in the U.K. and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S. — which may have been unwise, given that those are also Gordimer’s publishers, and both made it clear that their go-ahead was contingent on her approval. After Gordimer withheld that approval — “she wanted complete control, tsar-like, which would have turned the manuscript into pious crap,” alleges Roberts — both publishers suddenly lost interest in the project.

Related links:
Guardian story on scuttled Nadine Gordimer biography