Lady Lessing wins the Noble Prize for Literature

NI Wire

New Delhi

Fri, 12 Oct 2007: 

Oct 12: At last Dorris Lessing got the plaudit she deserved for her depth in literary oeuvre. The most prized Noble Prize made her to be the oldest one to gethis prize in recognition of her work.

The Royal Swedish Academy in its citation said Lessing as "that epicist of the female experience who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

Reacting to the news, Lessing, 87, said "It's a royal flush" - a reference to her many other literary honours.

She added "The Nobel Prize is the most prestigious and glamorous of all the prizes and I am absolutely delighted.”

Doris Lessing was born in Iran on October 22, 1919 to a British family, her father was a clerk with Imperial Bank of Persia and mother was a nurse. After World War I the family moved to Rhodesia.

Her childhood was a blend of some pleasure and much pain; she couldn’t carry on with her formal education.

And in those days of melancholy and unhappiness a writer was getting ready to emerge from this self educated intellectual. She grew up taller and taller with the bed time stories and later with Kipling, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Stevenson, and other.

Her early years were also spent riveting her fathers’ bitter memories of World War I, she kept on swallowing those memories as poison. She has written “We are all of us made by war," and "twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it."

Lessing left her home when she was 15, to carve her own niche but then life has its own way to shape us she, worked as a nurse maid and later as a telephone operator. She married at nineteen had two children, but after few years she become restless and left her family. She met a group of communist of the Left Book Club where she met Gottfried Lessing and got married to him.

After war she was disenchanted with the Communist movement, and disassociated herself altogether in 1954. She moved from Salisbury to London with her Son and she published her first novel ‘The Grass is Singing’ and she began her life as a professional writer.

The Grass is Singing is a story plotted, in Rhodesia now Zimbabwe and deals with the racial politics between whites and blacks in the country.

The Golden Notebook tells of Anna Wulf’s story of a woman’s conflict of work, sex love maternity and politics.

The Cleft is based on how men and women similar but distinct creature manage to live by side in the world, and how the essential of gender affect every aspects of our existence.

Her fictions are autobiographical and tell of her life story in which she tried to keep her concern alive.

The Good terrorist, Love Again, The Syrian experiment, The Marriage between Zones Three, Four and Five , The Fifth Child, The Canopus in Argos are her other novel which has fascinated the readers.

With almost all the literary awards in her name this came as soothing reward.