2007 Nobel Prizes Goes to Doris Lessing

11 Days after her 88th birthday the author of The Golden Notebook and The Grass is Singing is rewarded for a lifetime of writing of great power and insight into the human condition.
This is the second time in three years that the Nobel Prize for Literature has gone to a British author, following the win of playwright Harold Pinter in 2005.
Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 to British parents and grew up in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia). She moved to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. Her first novel, The Grass is Singing came out in 1950. The novel is set in the Rhodesia of her youth and explores the relationship of the white man to the country he has taken over and to the native people of that country. The key relationship is that between a married white woman and her black servant. The sharp analysis of the power and fear on both sides of the divide and the devastating portrait of a colonial society which neither cares for nor understands the country it has taken over made the book an instant and continuing success.
Doris Lessing has never stopped writing since and has produced a wide range of books in many various styles, including postmodern feminist fiction (The Golden Notebook), science fiction (the Canopus in Argos series), short stories and non-fiction, including two volumes of autobiography.
In recent years Lessing has, however, shown her iconoclastic side even more, as she has moved away from the praise of her as a classically feminist icon. She has described the critical celebration and public fame that she won for her feminist and socially realist works of the 60s and 70s (such as The Golden Notebook) as “her albatross” and is now more given to depicting women, especially elements of the 21st century feminist culture, as lazy and unadventurous. She recently claimed to be “increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so much of our culture”.
Her reaction to winning the Nobel? “I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one… It’s a royal flush!” And so, might we add, are we, her devoted readers, who have so enjoyed and been stimulated by her keenly intelligent writing. Justice, one cannot help but feel, has been done. Next Lobo Antunes? (And one great day – surely – Salman Rushdie?)


Kevin Charles Rowe