Lessing of UK wins Nobel for literature

FE Team | Published: October 12, 2007 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

British novelist Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature Thursday for a body of work that looked unflinchingly at the ills of the society, and also inspired a generation of feminist writers, reports Reuters from Stockholm.
The Swedish Academy, which awards the coveted 10 million Swedish crown ($1.54 million) prize, called 87-year-old Lessing an "epicist of the female experience, who, with skepticism, fire and visionary power, has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."
The oldest person to win a Nobel for literature, Lessing is the 34th female laureate since the prizes began in 1901, and the 11th woman to take the literature award.
Lessing, born to British parents in what was then Persia, now Iran, on October 22, 1919, was raised in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in 1925.
She went to a convent boarding school at the age of seven and later moved to a girls' school at Salisbury in Rhodesia.
Lessing ended her formal schooling at 14, and worked variously as a nanny, telephonist, office worker and journalist.
Her debut as a novelist came in 1950 with "The Grass is Singing," a book that examined the relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black servant.
Her 1962 work "The Golden Notebook" was widely considered her breakthrough.
"The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work, and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th century view of the male-female relationship," the academy said in its citation.
Outspoken Lessing's criticism of the governments in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia led her to be banned from both countries in the 1950s.
This was the fourth of this year's crop of Nobel prizes, handed out annually for achievements in science, literature, economics and peace.
"Doris doesn't know yet, because she's popped to the shops," a spokeswoman for Lessing said immediately after the announcement.
Jane Friedman, chief executive of HarperCollins, Lessing's publisher, called the award a complete surprise. "This is such a wonderful news. This is absolutely extraordinary," she told Reuters at the Frankfurt Book Fair. "She has been an icon for women for a lifetime."