Doris Lessing

British writer Doris Lessing has been named winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 - making her only the 11th woman laureate in the award's 106-year history. Announcing its choice to a huge cheer, the Stockholm-based Nobel Foundation described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny".

She is the oldest winner of the literature prize. She turned 88 years on October 22nd'07.

She was also short-listed in the past years, but had been informed that the Nobel Foundation did not favour her.

Gossip in the cafes and bars of Stockholm rumoured that the US writer Philip Roth might be this year's winner. In an interview with the Nobel Foundation after it finally acknowledged her worth, Lessing suggested the body might have struggled with the difficulty of categorizing her work, which spans the gamut from science fiction to Sufi mysticism to feminism.

Lessing herself rejects such categories. She has lived her life as a strong- minded and independent woman who has always been interested in the female consciousness and in gender, as well as social divides, and all her novels’ heroine’s primary pursuit is that of individual freedom.

Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

Doris's mother adapted to the rough life in the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce what was, in her view, a civilized, Edwardian life but the thousand-odd acres of farm-land her father had bought failed to yield the promised wealth.

Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from an otherwise miserable existence. Her mother, obsessed with raising a proper daughter, enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home, and then admitted Doris in a convent school, where nuns terrified their students with stories of hell and damnation. Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, (now Harare) from which she soon dropped out. She was 13 and it was the end of her formal education.

But like other women writers of south Africa who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She recently commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers. "Yes, I think that is true though it wasn't apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn't thinking in terms of being a writer then - I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time."

The parcels of books ordered from London fed her imagination, laying out other worlds to escape into...Lessing's early reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, and Kipling; later she discovered D.H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured her youth: her mother narrated the stories to the children and Doris herself kept her younger brother awake, spinning out tales.

Doris's early years were also spent absorbing her father's bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of "poison." "We are all of us made by war," Lessing has written, "twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it."

To stay away from her parents, Lessing left home when she was 15 and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read, while his brother-in-law crept into her bed at night and gave her inept kisses. During that time she was, Lessing has written, "in a fever of erotic longing." Frustrated by her backward suitor, she indulged in elaborate romantic fantasies. She was also writing stories, and sold 2 to magazines in South Africa.

Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the biological and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. "There is a whole generation of women," she has said, speaking of her mother's era, "and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them."

Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of "setting at a distance," taking the "raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general."

In 1937, she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At 19, she married Frank Wisdom, and had 2 children. A few years later, feeling imprisoned in the marriage and trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family. She went on to join the socialist Left Book Club, where she met and married Gottfried Lessing with whom she had 1 son.

In 1949, unable to stand what she has described as "stultifying" colonial society, she left her 2nd husband and set off to London with her son.

That year, she also published her 1st novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.

Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individual's own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good.

Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the 1950s and early 1960s, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956, in response to Lessing's courageous outspokenness, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.

In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University. Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography - Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. She received the James Tait Black Prize for Best Biography.

It was her 1st visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. Ironically, she was welcomed now as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40 years ago.

In 1996, her first novel in 7 years, Love Again, was published by HarperCollins. She did not make any personal appearances to promote the book. In an interview, she describes the frustration she felt during a 14-week worldwide tour to promote her autobiography: "I told my publishers it would be far more useful for everyone if I stayed at home, writing another book. But they wouldn't listen. This time round I stamped my little foot and said I would not move from my house and would do only one interview."

And the honors kept on coming: she was on the list of nominees for the Nobel Prize for Literature and Britain's Writer's Guild Award for Fiction in 1996.

Her new novel, titled "Mara and Dann", was published in the U.S in January 1999 and in the U.K. in April 1999.

In an interview in the London Daily Telegraph she said, "I adore writing it. I'll be so sad when it's finished. It's freed my mind."

In 2001, she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain's most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom and Third World causes.

She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize.

In 2005, she was on the shortlist for the 1st Man Booker International Prize.

In 2007, she has received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Her most recent novel is The Cleft published in 2007.

Looking back on her early life, Lessing was always trying to escape from narrow conformity and expectations of how women of a certain class ought to live their lives. She rejected the idea that women should give up their lives to marriage and children. It is a feminist sentiment, but for Lessing it is part of a wider rebellion.

"Obviously it was very painful, but I could not stand that society. You have no idea of the awfulness of it, I was going completely mad and I wouldn't have stuck to it. So I knew I had to leave," she has said of her flight from Zimbabwe.

Ironically, with her Nobel Prize, she has finally become part of the establishment. As Britain's 'Guardian' newspaper put it, "A dissonant voice, an unclubbable writer, has just joined literature's most elite club."

Compiled by Aparna Chatterjee

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