Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to Doris Lessing

On Thursday, October 11, Doris Lessing was named the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2007. In announcing the award, the Swedish Academy described Lessing as "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire, and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing was born on October 22, 1919, to British parents in what is now present-day Iran. Named Doris May Taylor at birth, she grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). In 1949, after her second divorce, she and her son, Peter, moved to London, where she established herself as a writer. Just a year after moving, her debut novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950), was released. The book looks at the relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black servant. The Swedish Academy said, "The book is both a tragedy based in love-hatred and a study of unbridgeable racial conflicts."

From 1952 to 1956, Lessing was a member of the British Communist Party and active in the campaign against nuclear weapons. She was also very critical of the South African regime, which resulted in the author being banned from the country from 1956 to 1995. She was also barred from Southern Rhodesia in 1956 for the same reason. In African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (1992), she details her visit in 1982 to the country where she had grown up.

The Golden Notebook (1962) represented Lessing's literary breakthrough. As the Academy noted, "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. It used a more complex narrative technique to reveal how political and emotion conflicts are intertwined."

Other important works include The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and The Fifth Child (1988). "In the former, the reader at first infers a liberation motif: a woman finally about to fulfill her gift and sexual desires," the Academy noted. "After a first reading, the contours of the real novel take shape: a ruthless study of the collapse of values in middle age. The Fifth Child is a masterfully realized psychological thriller, where a woman's repressed or denied aggression against family life is incarnated in a monstrous boy child."

Lessing has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1954; the W. H. Smith Literary Award in 1986; the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1995; and the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award in 2002.

Lessing's most recent release is The Cleft, published by HarperCollins.