Nadine Gordimer, an internationally renowned South African writer who helped expose the world to the evils of apartheid through her literature, has died at 90.

Law firm Edward Nathan Sonnenbergs released a statement Monday confirming that the activist and Nobel laureate died in her sleep in her home in Johannesburg on Sunday.

"She ... will be lovingly remembered by her family, friends and literary colleagues," reads the statement, according to the Eyewitness News.

The New York Times reported that Gordimer won a Nobel Prize in 1991 for her body of literary work, which largely focused on apartheid, the systematic, institutionalized and legal segregation of the black population of South Africa. Those laws were enacted in 1948.

Although Gordimer was white, she became an early and active member of the anti-apartheid political group African National Congress. She also co-founded the majority-black Congress of South African Writers.

Instead of composing political manifestos, the Jewish writer said her role as an author was to "write in my own way as honestly as I can and go as deeply as I can into the life around me," The Washington Post reported.

Gordimer said she did not choose to center her writing career on combating apartheid. Instead, she said, she found it impossible to write about her homeland without delving into the racist divide and oppression in South Africa, especially after the Afrikaner nationalists took over in 1948.

"I am not a political person by nature," Gordimer said, according to the Times. "I don't suppose if I had lived elsewhere, my writing would have reflected politics much, if at all."

Four of her novels were banned by the apartheid government: "A World of Strangers," "The Late Bourgeois World," "Burger's Daughter" and "July's People."

While awarding Gordimer the Nobel Prize for literature, Sture Allen, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, said, "She makes visible the extremely complicated and utterly inhuman living conditions in the world of racial segregation. ... In this way, artistry and morality fuse."

"This aesthetic venture of ours becomes subversive when the shameful secrets of our times are explored deeply, with the artist's rebellious integrity to the state of being manifest in life around her or him," Gordimer said in her Nobel lecture. "Then the writer's themes and characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and distortions of that society as the life of the fisherman is determined by the power of the sea."