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By Pia Ohlin
STOCKHOLM: British writer Doris Lessing on Thursday won the Nobel
Literature Prize for five decades of epic novels that have covered
feminism and politics, as well her youth in Africa.
Lessing, who will turn 88 on October 22, is only
the 11th woman to have won the prize since it was first awarded in
1901.
The Swedish Academy described the author of The
Golden Notebook as “that epicist of the female experience who with
skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided
civilization to scrutiny.”
Lessing was out shopping when the prize was
announced and only learned the news several hours later when she
returned to her London home and was met by a throng of journalists.
“This has been going on for 30 years,” said
Lessing who put down her groceries and sat on her doorstep, head in
her hand, after being told of the award by the waiting
photographers.
“I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every
bloody one, so I’m delighted to win them all. It’s a royal
flush,” she said.
Her work has covered a multitude of topics, and
over the years she has been mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate
but she was not seen as among the frontrunners this year.
“Some decisions take time to mature before you
can make them,” the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy,
Horace Engdahl, said.
Although The Golden Notebook, her best-known
work, established her as a feminist icon back in 1962, she has
consistently refused the label and says her writing does not play a
directly political role.
Nonetheless, the Nobel jury noted that “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.”
Born Doris May Taylor in Khermanshah, in what is
now Iran, on October 22, 1919, Lessing spent her formative years on
a farm in Southern Rhodesia, what is now Zimbabwe, where her British
parents moved in 1925.
It was, she later reflected, a “hellishly
lonely” upbringing.
Unsurprisingly, she could not wait to escape and
in 1939 married Frank Wisdom, by whom she had two children before
their divorce in 1943.
She then married a German political activist
named Gottfried Lessing, but divorced again in 1949, when she fled
to Britain with her young son and the manuscript of her first novel,
The Grass Is Singing.
A searing examination of racial oppression and
colonialism, it was published the following year to rapid success.
Her radical political affinities drew her into
the British Communist Party, but she resigned in 1956 at the time of
the Hungarian uprising, never to return.
Her Children of Violence series of novels,
published between 1952 and 1969 around a central character named
Martha Quest, first established her credentials as both a writer and
a feminist.
“I wasn’t an active feminist in the 1960s,
never have been,” she has since insisted. “I never liked the
movement because it’s too ideologically based. All sorts of claims
were made for me that simply weren’t true.”
In the 1980s, with her popularity in brief
decline, she decided to test the importance of a name in publishing,
and submitted a novel under a pseudonym, only to find it rejected.
It was later published, when she revealed her true identity.
Over the years, she became an increasingly
outspoken critic of Africa, particularly the corruption and
embezzlement by governments.
She was barred entry to South Africa in 1956,
but was finally able to revisit in 1995, after the fall of
apartheid.
In recent years Lessing has also written several
works of science fiction.
She is also probably one of the oldest people
anywhere to have her own page on the popular social networking web
site MySpace.
On a recent visit the site announced, under the
label “Female-87 years old,” that “Doris Lessing has 136
friends.”
Speaking to the BBC on Thursday, Lessing said
her age may have tipped the Nobel jury in her favor.
“They can’t give a Nobel to someone who’s
dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it
to me now before I popped off,” she said.
Among the other awards she has won are the Prix
Medicis in 1976 and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1995.
Last year, the Nobel Literature Prize went to
Turkish author Orhan Pamuk.
Lessing will receive a Nobel gold medal, a
diploma and 10 million Swedish kronor (1.53 million dollars, 1.08
million euros) from the hands of Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf at
a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on
Friday.
--AFP
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