The Royal Swedish Academy
announced in Stockholm
on Thursday that the Literature Nobel Prize is awarded to the British author
Doris Lessing.
The Royal
Swedish Academy
cited British author Lessing as "that epicist of the female experience who
with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization
to scrutiny." Lessing, who is 87-year old, has become the the 11th woman
author to win the prestigious award since 1901.
Lessing's name has been mentioned for years, but
"decisions have to mature," said Permanent Secretary Horace Engdahl. Lessing's
literary work spans 70 years. "It was probably one of the most deliberated
(decisions) in the Academy's history", he added.
Doris Lessing, who now lives in London,
was born on 22 October 1919 to British parents in what was then known as
Kermanshah in Persia (now Bakhtaran in Iran) as Doris May Taylor. Her
father, Alfred Cook Taylor, formerly a captain in the British army during the
First World War, was a bank official. Her mother, Emily Maude Taylor, had been
a nurse. In 1925 she moved with the family to a farm in what was then Southern
Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)
When 14 she independently ended her formal schooling. In the
following years she worked as a young nanny, telephonist, office worker,
stenographer and journalist and had several short stories published. In 1939
she married Frank Charles Wisdom with whom she had a son, John, and a daughter,
Jean. The couple divorced in 1943. In 1945 Doris
married Gottfried Lessing, a German-Jewish immigrant. She and Gottfried had a
son, Peter. When the couple divorced in 1949, she took Peter and moved to London, quickly
establishing herself as a writer.
Lessing literary debut was in 1950 with The Grass is Singing,
which examines the relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black
servant. But The Golden Notebook from 1962 marked her real breakthrough and the
book that played a role in the emerging feminist movement.
During the 1970s she published Briefing for a Descent into
Hell, Collected African Stories and explored the science fiction genre in the
series Canopus in Argos: Archives.
The autobiographical Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the
Shade (1997) represented a new peak in her writing. Lessing recalls not only
her own life but the entire epoch: England in the last days of the
empire. Her novel The Sweetest Dream (2001) is a stand-alone sequel in fictive
form.
"This has been going on for 30 years. I've won all the
prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm
delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush." Lessing said after she learned about the Nobel
Prize
The literature prize was the fourth Nobel Prize to be
announced this week.