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Doris Lessing Wins Nobel for Literature
"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 in its citation announcing the prize.
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.
  Writer Doris Lessing, 86, sits in her home in a quiet block of north London April 17, 2006. Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature for "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny." (AP Photo/Martin Cleaver) (Martin Cleaver - AP) TOOLBOXCOMMENT |
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CLOSE"When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s," she told the AP 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?"
Lessing is the second British writer to win the prize since 2005, when Harold Pinter received the award. Last year, the academy gave the prize to Turkey's Orhan Pamuk.
A seasoned traveler of the world, Lessing has known many homes, from Persia to Zimbabwe to South Africa to London, where she lives on a quiet block in a neighborhood long favored by artists and intellectuals.
Like Pinter, Pamuk and other recent Nobel winners, Lessing has a history of political controversy. Because of her criticism of the South Africa's former apartheid system, she was prohibited from entering the country between 1956 and 1995. Lessing, a member of the British Communist Party in the 1950s who later rejected leftist ideology, had been active in campaigning against nuclear weapons.
The literature award was the fourth of this year's Nobel Prizes to be announced. On Wednesday, Gerhard Ertl of Germany won the 2007 Nobel Prize in chemistry for studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces, which are key to understanding such questions as why the ozone layer is thinning.
Tuesday, France's Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg won the physics award for discovering a phenomenon that enables computers and digital music players store reams of data on ever-shrinking hard disks.
Americans Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Briton Sir Martin J. Evans, won the medicine award on Monday for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes.
Prizes for peace and economics will be announced through Oct. 15.
The awards _ each worth $1.5 million _ will be handed out by Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
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AP national writer Hillel Italie in New York contributed to this story.
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