Doris Lessing wins Nobel Literature Prize

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 was first awarded in 1901 and only the third since 1996.

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.'

Jonathan Clowes, Lessing's agent, said, "We are absolutely delighted because it is so well deserved. She doesn't know yet, she's out shopping and we are trying to get in touch with her before she discovers it in the news." 

Lessing, whose work has covered a multitude of topics, has over the years been mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate but she was not seen among the frontrunners this year.   

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.

Nonetheless, for the Nobel jury, '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.'

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 1925.

It was, she later reflected, a 'hellishly lonely' upbringing. In 'Africa Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe', published in 1992, she describes going back in 1982 to the country where she had grown up. 

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

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.'