Lessing, Doris May (1919– )

English novelist and short-story writer. Concerned with social and political themes, particularly the place of women in society, her work includes The Grass is Singing (1950), the five-novel series Children of Violence (1952–69), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), The Fifth Child (1988), London Observed (1992), Love Again (1996), and The Cleft (2007). In 2007 she won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran) but brought up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). She dropped out of school at 13 and educated herself, reading widely. She has commented that her unhappy childhood made her a fiction writer. Unhappy in her first marriage, which she entered at 19, her second marriage was to Gottfried Lessing, the central figure of a group of communists called the Left Book Club. Eventually disillusioned by communism, she moved to London with her son in 1949 and began her career as a professional writer.

In 2001 she was awarded the £30,000 David Cohen lifetime achievement award. She has also written an ‘inner space fiction’ series Canopus in Argus: Archives (1979–83), and under the pen-name ‘Jane Somers’, The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1981). Under My Skin (1994), Walking in the Shade (1997), and Ben, in the World (2000) are volumes of autobiography.

She is only the 11th woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in the prize's 106-year history. She greeted the news of her winning the award with little enthusiasm, commenting that it had been a long time coming.