Doris Lessing wins Nobel Prize in literature
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/11/europe/EU-GEN-Sweden-Nobel-Literature.php?page=2
STOCKHOLM, Sweden: Doris Lessing, author of dozens of works from short stories to science fiction, including the classic "The Golden Notebook," won the Nobel Prize for literature Thursday. She was praised by the judges for her "skepticism, fire and visionary power."
Lessing, 11 days short of her 88th birthday, is the oldest choice ever for a prize that usually goes to writers in their 50s and 60s. Although she is widely celebrated for "The Golden Notebook" and other works, she has received little attention in recent years and has been criticized as strident and eccentric.
Swedish Academy Permanent Secretary Horace Engdahl was not able to reach Lessing before announcing the prize in Stockholm, but reporters waiting outside her home on a leafy North London street told her she had won as she pulled up in a black cab, two hours later.
"Oh Christ, I couldn't care less," she said. "This has been going on for 30 years."
"I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all," Lessing said. "It's a royal flush."
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Later, she told reporters: "I thought you were shooting some kind of television series."
Lessing is the 11th woman to be awarded the prize and just the 34th woman to win any Nobel Prize since they were first handed out in 1901.
In its citation, the academy called Lessing an "epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."
Lessing's work, which has drawn heavily from her time living in Africa, has explored the divide between whites and blacks, most notably in 1950's "The Grass Is Singing," which examined the relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black servant. The academy called it "both a tragedy based in love-hatred and a study of unbridgeable racial conflicts."
Lessing was born to British parents who were living in what is now Bakhtaran, Iran. The family moved to a farm in southern Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe, in 1925, an experience she described in the first part of her autobiography "Under My Skin" that was released in 1994.
Because of her criticism of the South African regime, and its apartheid system, she was prohibited from entering the country between 1956 and 1995. Lessing, who was a member of the British Communist Party in the 1950s, had also campaigned against nuclear weapons.
Engdahl said that Lessing's win could erupt into a political debate, given her fierce feminism and anti-war feelings.
"That's hard to avoid because great writers are symbols in their own country. They've often been part of political movements of various kinds and they have played a political role," he told AP, citing reaction to when Hungary's Imre Kertesz and South African J.M. Coetzee received the prize in 2002 and 2003.
"I mean, who would have guessed that when we gave the prize to Imre Kertesz that people in Hungary would be upset because he was a Jew?" Engdahl said. "Who would have guessed the prize to Coetzee would (draw) criticism that he was not a black man?"
Lessing's semi-autobiographical "Children Of Violence" series — five books spanning 1952 to 1969 — was largely set in Africa.
Her breakthrough was the 1962 novel "The Golden Notebook," which was seen as a pioneering work by the feminist movement "It belongs to the handful of books that inform the 20th century view of the male-female relationship," the academy said.
Her other important novels include "The Summer Before Dark" in 1973 and "The Fifth Child" in 1988.
She has also been lauded for her work in science fiction, penning the series "Canopus in Argos: Archives" from 1979-1984, that studied the post-atomic war development of humanity.
The academy said that Lessing's "vision of global catastrophe forcing mankind to return to a more primitive life" has been readily apparent in some of her recent books.
Those include "Mara and Dann" from 1999 and its sequel, "The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog," published in 2005.
Lessing is the second British writer to win the prize since 2005 when Harold Pinter received it. Turkey's Orhan Pamuk won in 2006.
Lessing has won a string of prizes, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1995, but never the Man Booker Prize, formerly known as the Booker Prize, which was established in 1969 and is open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of former British colonies.
The literature award was the fourth of this year's Nobel Prizes to be announced.
On Wednesday, Gerhard Ertl of Germany won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces. On Tuesday, France's Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg won the physics award for discovering a phenomenon that lets computers and digital music players store reams of data on ever-shrinking hard disks.
Americans Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Briton Sir Martin J. Evans, won the medicine prize Monday for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes.
Prizes for peace and economics will be Friday and Monday.
The awards — each worth 10 million Swedish kronor (US$1.5 million; €1.1 million) — will be handed out by Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
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