2007 Nobel Prize in Literature: Doris Lessing

William Atkins
Friday, 12 October 2007 03:58

Science - Climate

It was announced on Thursday, October 11, 2007, that British writer Doris Lessing will be awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. She is the eleventh woman author to be awarded the prize since 1901.

The Nobel Prize committee said of Lessing: "that epicist of the female experience who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

Among her books are “The Grass is Singing, in 1950, “The Golden Notebook, from 1962, “The Four-Gated City,” in 1969, “Briefing for a Descent into Hell”, in 1971, “Canopus in Argos Archives,” 1979 to 1983, “Memoirs of a survivor”, 1972, “Making of the Representative for Planet 8,” in 1982, “The Good Terrorist, in 1985, “African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe,” in 1992, her autobiography “Under My Skin,” in 1994, “Walking in the Shade,” in 1997, and “The Cleft,” in 2007.

Lessing was born Doris May Tayler on October 22, 1919, to British parents (Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler) in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran). Her family moved in 1925 to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). She attended the Dominican Convent High School, in Salisbury (now Harare) until the age of 13 years, after which she was self taught.

Lessing worked as a nursemaid, shorthand typist, and telephone operator before marrying Frank Charles Wisdom in 1939. They had a son and a daughter. They divorced in 1943.

Two years later she married Gottfried Lessing, and they had one son. When the couple divorced in 1949, she moved to London, England, where she was active in the British Communist Party from 1952 to 1956.

Some of her many awards have been the Somerset Maugham Award, the W.H. Smith Literary Award, the Palermo Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Book Rize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the David Cohen British Literary Prize.

Her website is: http://www.dorislessing.org/. Her Nobel Prize biography appears at: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/bio-bibl.html.