Although Nadine Gordimer is one of South Africa’s most famous people — she was a co-winner of the Booker prize in 1974 and won the Nobel prize for literature in 1991 — going to interview her is a bit like going to talk to a recluse.

Although her many novels and short stories — almost all of them chronicling the moral and psychological evils of apartheid — have earned her a world reputation, she is intensely private and has put almost the whole of her life into her writing. It must have been a cloistered existence. She started to write at nine, published her first story at 14, attended a convent and was kept at home by a mother who imagined she had a weak heart. She spent only one year at university before returning home to write and played almost no public role in the anti-apartheid cause she supported.

She knew the radicals who fought, got banned, placed under house arrest, imprisoned, tortured and exiled but she refused all such involvement. Her job, she felt, was just to write. Coming from a well-to-do family, she was free to do so. Her first book was published in 1949 and she has never stopped writing since.

A keen supporter of the African National Congress — she joined it as soon as it was legal and was even offered a place on its parliamentary list in 1994 — she has been criticised by some for political naivety. Although she has been bitingly dismissive of South African liberals, her relationship to the real world of politics has been more that of a spectator than a participant. Certainly, her occasional forays into that world have not all been happy. Her role, for instance, in disinviting Salman Rushdie from visiting South Africa once the fatwa was pronounced against him, led to bitter public criticism from JM Coetzee, South Africa’s other Nobel-winning author.

Gordimer claims that “nothing is as true as my fiction” and indeed, though many found her style almost too austere and economical, at its best — as in her Burger’s Daughter (1979) — she was compared to Virginia Woolf and the great 19th-century Russian novelists.

Interviewing her comes with a lot of don’ts. She will not, her publishers warn, answer questions about herself, her children (both of whom have emigrated from South Africa), her late husband, previous books she’s written or what she’s working on now. A long list of further proscriptions follows. This makes things difficult since Telling Tales, the volume of short stories she has just edited — with (already published) stories contributed by everyone from Günter Grass and John Updike to Salman Rushdie and Woody Allen — is a fundraising work for HIV/Aids with all proceeds going to South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign.

And not only is South Africa the country worst affected by Aids — by 2003 27.9% of all adults here were HIV-positive and by mid-2004 Aids deaths had reached 1.5m — but thanks to President Thabo Mbeki’s repeated denials that HIV causes Aids and his government’s determined foot-dragging in providing anti-Aids drugs, the subject stirs great, and sometimes peculiar passions.

The Gordimer house, in a genteelly decaying Johannesburg suburb, is large but unpretentious. “Better bring your car in,” she says. “Quite a few left outside have been stolen.” Comfortably ensconced in Gordimer’s sitting room one is struck by her intelligent eyes and queenly presence. Telling Tales is clearly a noble initiative, I say, but Gordimer is presumably aware that the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) is a highly political choice of recipient? Zackie Achmat, the campaign leader, has accused Mbeki of “vindictiveness” and the health ministry of being “completely derelict in procuring the medicines” and “playing games and manufacturing scarcity where none exists”.

Currently the ANC’s website carries a bitter attack on the campaign for its endless litigation to force the government to disclose its plans to roll out anti- retroviral (ARV) treatment.

“I don’t want to get involved in all that,” replies Gordimer, who is a vocal supporter of the ANC government. “I’m not concerned with areas of dissent. I judge the TAC on what it does, not what it says. Its practical work is impressive and that’s what we want to enlarge.”

She talks of the damage being done through the loss of skilled people to Aids, how women are most vulnerable to the virus and how the book’s publishers around the world have all agreed to forgo a profit. She is flying to New York to launch it with great fanfare alongside Kofi Annan. “We looked at what musicians like Bono and Geldof have done and thought writers must do something too. But we’re not publishing an Aids tract. That wouldn’t sell and the whole point is to make money.”

One can only wish more power to her elbow, but can one really dismiss the peculiarity of the South African context like this? The whole point of the TAC and other Aids activists is that the country can never deal with its Aids problem while the president is an Aids denialist, and while the government keeps putting back the timetable for providing ARVs.

Moreover, we have a health minister who recommends eating beetroot and the African potato as Aids cures. Just last week the deputy health minister, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, told parliament that sangomas (witch doctors) may well know the cure for Aids and that “western medicine could take a few lessons” from them. Aids activists say there is no hope of dealing with the crisis effectively while government encourages such confusion and obscurantism. The problem is not lack of money: the government hugely underspends its Aids budget and has often made it difficult for foreign donors to help the Aids effort.