Nobel Prize-Winning Novelist Doris Lessing Dies Aged 94

Novelist Doris Lessing, who tackled race, ideology, gender politics and the workings of the psyche in a prolific and often iconoclastic career, dies at the age of 94.

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN (OCTOBER 11, 2007) (REUTERS) - The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing, one of the most important English-language writers of the late 20th century, has died aged 94, her publisher said on Sunday (November 17).

Lessing tackled race, ideology, gender politics and the workings of the psyche in a prolific and often iconoclastic career, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, only the 11th woman to do so.She died peacefully at her London home in the early hours of the morning, publisher HarperCollins said in a statement.

"She was a wonderful writer with a fascinating and original mind; it was a privilege to work for her and we shall miss her immensely," her agent Jonathan Clowes said.

Born to British parents in what was then Persia, now Iran, on October 22, 1919, Lessing was raised in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

She went to a convent boarding school at the age of seven and later moved to a girls' school inSalisbury, Rhodesia.

Lessing ended her formal schooling at 14 and worked variously as a nanny, telephonist, office worker and journalist.

She moved to Britain at the age of 30 with the manuscript of her first novel, "The Grass Is Singing", about the relationship of a white farmer's wife and her black servant. It was an immediate bestseller in Britain, Europe and America.

Her early 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 insouthern Africa - work that earned her "prohibited alien" status in white-ruled Southern Rhodesiaand South Africa.

But it was her 1962 novel "The Golden Notebook" that propelled her onto the international stage with its unconventional style and format, and linked her firmly to the feminist cause.

Its female heroine, Anna Wulf, is a writer caught in a personal and artistic crisis who sees her life compartmentalised into various roles.

But Lessing's output also ranged much more widely.

In some 55 novels and collections of short stories and essays, she focused on the role of the family and the individual in society and even ventured into science fiction.

The four novels of "Canopus in Argos", published between 1979 and 1983, provide a “"space eye" view of human life by describing a colonised planet Earth used as a social laboratory by galactic empires.

In "The Good Terrorist" (1985), she returned to the political arena through the story of a group of political activists who set up a squat in London.

In 1987's "The Wind Blows Away Our Words", Lessing attacked what she saw as the West's indifference to the war in Afghanistan. In it, she described a trip she made in 1986 to Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan.

And a year later, "The Fifth Child", the story of a mother's rejection of her son, was concerned with alienation and the dangers inherent in a closed social group.

Her recent work included "The Grandmothers" (2003), a collection of four short novels centred on an unconventional extended family, and "Time Bites" (2004), a selection of essays based on her life experiences. "The Cleft", published in 2007, tells the story of an all-female community which has no need of men.

The novel "Alfred and Emily", published in 2008, was only a partially fictionalised account of the lives of her parents.

On announcing her Nobel Prize win in 2007, the Swedish Academy's Horace Engdahl described Lessing as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."

Lessing was initially underwhelmed by her win when the news was broken to her by a Reuters Television reporter outside her London home.

"Oh Christ. Well it's been going on now for thirty years, one can't get more excited," she said.

She reacted with barely concealed contempt for the panellists in Stockholm responsible for her award.

"They're going to say over there 'Oh God, we've got to give it to that woman at some time, I suppose.' I mean, am I supposed to get elated or excited or what? I have won all the prizes in Europe, every one, so you know, I've won them all. So okay the Nobel. This is, as I say, a royal flush. It's all very good," she said.

The outspoken writer said she hoped the manners of the panellists had improved, claiming that she had been told explicitly by the prize-givers four decades earlier that she would never be considered for an award because they disliked her.

"They told me a long time ago they didn't like me and I would never get it. This was at least 40 years ago, maybe it's less, 35 years. They said 'You will never get the Nobel Prize because we don't like you', and they sent a special official to tell me so. I mean, the whole thing is so graceless, and stupid, and bad-mannered. Bad-mannered, that's what they are," she said.

For health reasons, the then 88-year old Lessing was unable to travel to the official ceremony inStockholm to receive her prize, so was presented with the prize insignia by Swedish AmbassadorStaffan Carlsson at a ceremony in London.

She conceded the award had changed her life.

"My son Peter said, it's very strange, he said, here you are writing away and writing away and suddenly people notice you. This is the thing in a nutshell," she said, before describing in her acceptance speech that receiving the award was "astonishing and amazing".

"But I would like to say that there isn't anywhere to go from here is there unless, like some exemplars, recent ones, I could get a pat on the head from the pope," she said, to laughs from the audience.