Doris Lessing is awarded Nobel Prize for Literature

Lessing is only the 11th woman to be awarded prestigious prize

11 October 2007

The British novelist Doris Lessing has today (11 October 2007) been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is awarded 10m kroner (£763,000) for her life’s work over a 57-year career. In addition to the cash prize, Lessing will receive a gold medal and an invitation to give a lecture at the academy’s headquarters in Stockholm.

Lessing has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize with her novels Briefing for a Descent in to Hell (1971), The Sirian Experiments(1981) and The Good Terrorist (1985). She has also been nominated twice for the new Man Booker International Prize, in 2005 and 2007. Her breakthrough novel was The Golden Notebook, published in 1962.

Lessing, 87, is only the 11th woman to win the prize, awarded by the Swedish Academy, since it began in 1901. She is the second British writer to win in three years, after Harold Pinter was honoured in 2005. Turkish author Orhan Pamuk won last year.

The Swedish Academy described Lessing as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”.

Lessing, who was born to British parents who were living in what is now Iran, made her debut with The Grass Is Singing in 1950.

The Man Booker Prize Fiction at its finest