Doris Lessing wins Nobel Prize

2007-10-11 14:21

Stockholm - British writer Doris Lessing on Thursday won the Nobel Literature Prize for five decades of epic novels that have covered feminism, politics as well her youth in Africa.

Lessing, who will be 88 next week, is only the 11th woman to have won the prize since it started in 1901.

The Swedish Academy described Lessing as "that epicist of the female experience who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."

Lessing has covered a multitude of topics.

Feminist icon

Although The Golden Notebook, her best known work, established her as a feminist icon back in 1962, she has consistently refused the label and says her writing does not play a directly political role.

Born Doris May Taylor in Khermanshah, in what is now Iran, on October 22, 1919, Lessing spent her formative years on a farm in Southern Rhodesia, what is now Zimbabwe, where her British parents moved in 1927.

It was, she later reflected, a "hellishly lonely" upbringing.

Unsurprisingly, she could not wait to escape and in 1939 married Frank Wisdom, by whom she had two children before their divorce in 1943.

Rapid success

She then married a German political activist called Gottfried Lessing, but divorced again in 1949, when she fled to Britain with her young son and the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing.

A searing examination of racial oppression and colonialism, it was published the following year to rapid success.

Her radical political affinities drew her into the British Communist Party, but she resigned in 1956 at the time of the Hungarian uprising, never to return.

Her Children of Violence series of novels, published between 1952 and 1969 around a central character named Martha Quest, first established her credentials as both a writer and a feminist.

"I wasn't an active feminist in the 60s, never have been," she has since insisted.

"I never liked the movement because it's too ideologically based. All sorts of claims were made for me that simply weren't true."

In the 1980s, with her popularity in brief decline, she decided to test the importance of a name in publishing, and submitted a novel under a pseudonym, only to find it rejected. It was later published, when she revealed her true identity.

Outspoken critic

She became an increasingly outspoken critic of Africa, particularly the corruption and embezzlement by governments, but was finally able to revisit southern Africa in 1995, after the fall of apartheid.

Her novel The Good Terrorist (1985), about an immature young woman who joins a terrorist cell, has strong echoes today.

In recent years Lessing, who lives in the London suburb of Hampstead, has also written several works of science fiction.

She is also probably one of the oldest people anywhere to have her own page on the popular social networking web site MySpace.

On a recent visit the site announced, under the label "Female - 87 years old," that "Doris Lessing has 136 friends."

- AFP