Doris Lessing is the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Announcing the award today, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny." The award brings a prize of 10 million Swedish crown (about US$1.5 million).
Lessing, the 11th woman to win the Literature prize, is also the oldest recipient of the Prize, but apparently she wasn't expecting it. Horace Engdahl, the Academy's permanent secretary, told the Associated Press "I've phoned her but there's been no answer. She was not sitting and waiting for my call. She doesn't know yet, and I'm afraid she's out taking a stroll somewhere in the park and people will attack her with the news."
Lessing's agent, Jonathan Clowes, said the author was out shopping when the prize was announced. "We are absolutely delighted and it's very well deserved," he said.
Lessing actually learned of the news from a group of reporters waiting outside her home: she'd just returned from visiting her son in the hospital. "I was a bit surprised because I had forgotten about it actually," she said. "My name has been on the short list for such a long time."
The actual award ceremony, with presentations by Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf, will be in Stockholm on December 10.
 Her most recent book, The Cleft, is the story of a Roman senator at the end of his life, embarking on "one last epic endeavor: to retell the history of human creation and reveal the little-known story of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic coastal wilderness. The Clefts have neither need nor knowledge of men; childbirth is controlled through the cycles of the moon, and they bear only female children. But with the unheralded birth of a strange new child—a boy—the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into jeopardy."
Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919, to British parents. Her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother was a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), but it wasn't a successful endeavor. Doris was sent to a convent school, and then to an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury. She dropped out, ending her formal education, at the age of 13, but she read voraciously, making herself a "self-educated intellectual." She left home at 15, taking a job as a nursemaid. At 18, she moved to Salisbury and worked as a telephone operator. The next year, she married Frank Wisdom, and had two children. A few years later, "feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family." She soon joined the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.
By 1949, she had divorced Lessing, moved to London with her young son and published her first novel, The Grass is Singing, as she became increasingly disenchanted with the Communist movement (which she left altogether in 1954).
According to her web site, "Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individual's own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the fifties and early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956, in response to Lessing's courageous outspokenness, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa."
"In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wulf seems to reach by the end of [her 1962 novel] The Golden Notebook. Lessing's 'inner-space fiction' deals with cosmic fantasies (Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974), and science fiction probings of higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, [originally published as five novels, 1979-1983]). These reflect Lessing's interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society."
Lessing was a Guest of Honor at the 1987 World Science Fiction Convention in Brighton, England, and appears to be the first WorldCon GoH to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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