Lessing, 88, wins literature Nobel prize

DORIS LESSING, author of The Golden Notebook, won the Nobel Prize for literature yesterday. She was praised by the judges for her “scepticism, fire and visionary power”.

Ms Lessing, 11 days short of her 88th birthday, is the oldest choice for a prize that usually goes to authors in their 50s and 60s. Although she is widely celebrated, she has received little attention in recent years and has been criticised as strident and eccentric.

Even Ms Lessing apparently was not expecting to win, the academy’s permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said.

“I’ve phoned her but there’s been no answer. She was not sitting and waiting for my call,” Mr Engdahl said. “She doesn’t know yet, and I’m afraid she’s out taking a stroll somewhere in the park and people will attack her with the news.”

Ms Lessing’s agent, Jonathan Clowes, said the London-based author was out shopping when the prize was announced.

“We are absolutely delighted and it’s very well deserved,” Mr Clowes said.

However, American literary critic Harold Bloom called the academy’s decision “pure political correctness”.

“Although Ms Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable...fourth-rate science fiction,” Bloom said.

A largely self-taught author who ended formal schooling at age 13, Ms Lessing has drawn heavily from her time living in Africa, exploring the divide between whites and blacks, most notably in 1950’s The Grass Is Singing, which examined the relationship between a white farmer’s wife and her black servant. The academy called it “both a tragedy based in love-hatred and study of unbridgeable racial conflicts”.

A prolific author, Ms Lessing was born to British parents who were living in what is now Bakhtaran, Iran. Her works include short stories, essays and such novels as The Good Terrorist and Martha Quest, the latter part of her semi-autobiographical Children Of Violence series. But to millions she is known for The Golden Notebook, published in 1962 and still a feminist classic although Ms Lessing does not consider the book a political statement.

“The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that inform the 20th century view of the male-female relationship,” the academy said.

Ms Lessing was also cited for her “vision of global catastrophe forcing mankind to return to a more primitive life, noting such recent works as Mara and Dann and its sequel, The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, published in 2005.

“When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s,” she said in an interview a year ago. “What I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire — nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?”