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.