African Laughter

2007 Nobel Prize in Literature

Doris Lessing was born in 1919 in Kermanshah, in present-day Iran, to English parents, and at the age of five, moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. From 1949 until her death, she lived in London. She was one of the most important writers of the 20th century, having been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described the author as an "epic storyteller of the female experience, who with skepticism, ardor and visionary force subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny." Maria Teresa Horta would say: "I feared that the fate of other remarkable women like Virginia Woolf and Marguerite Yourcenar, who died without receiving the Nobel Prize, would be fulfilled, but fortunately this did not happen and it was an excellent choice by the Academy."
He wrote some seven dozen books over a career spanning nearly eighty years. Constantly pushing the boundaries of convention in the novel, Lessing was unafraid to explore taboo subjects in provocative and inventive works that were always influential, ranging from novels, short stories, and science fiction to autobiography, theatre, poetry, and essays. His first novel, The Grass Sings, was published in 1950, and his international reputation has flourished ever since. Among his celebrated novels are The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before Darkness, Memoirs of a Survivor or The Fifth Son, first published in 1988. He also published two autobiographical volumes, Under my Skin and Walking in the Shadow.
Five, a collection of short novels, earned him the prize Somerset Maugham in 1954. The French translation of The Golden Notebook (1962) won the Prize Medici in 1976. Lessing was also nominated three times for the Booker Prize, through the works Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), The Syrian Experiences (1981) and The Good Terrorist (1985). In 1991, he received the title of Distinguished Fellow in Literature from the School of English and American StudiesShe received a doctorate from the University of East Anglia in 1995 and an honorary doctorate from Harvard University. In 2001, she was awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature. David Cohen of Literature and received the title of Honorary Companion from the Royal Society of Literature British.
He died in 2013, at the age of 94.