MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

British activist Doris Lessing wins Nobel for literature

Nobel winner Doris Lessing

British writer, Iran born, Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature, the Swedish Academy announced Thursday citing her “skepticism, fire and visionary power” in dozens of works, notably her classic “The Golden Notebook.”

Lessing, 87, born Doris Taylor is the daughter of a former British Army officer and a nurse who were living in Kermanshah, Persia, which is now Iran. The family moved in 1925 to southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe an experience she described in the first part of her autobiography "Under My Skin" that was released in 1944. She dropped out of school at age 13 and had multiple jobs (baby sitter, phone operator, office clerk, journalist and wrote several short stories) before marrying Frank Charles Wisdom with whom she had a son and a daughter. They divorced in 1943 and two years later married Gottfried Lessing a German Jew immigrant linked to Marxist groups. In 1949 she divorced Lessing and moved definitively to London to begin full time writing. She made her debut with "The Grass Is Singing" in 1950. Her other works include the semiautobiographical "Children of Violence" series, largely set in Africa but her breakthrough was the 1962 "Golden Notebook" said the Swedish Academy. "The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that inform the 20th century view of the male-female relationship," the academy said in its citation announcing the prize. Other important novels of Lessing's include "The Summer Before Dark" in 1973 and "The Fifth Child" in 1988. 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 been active in campaigning against nuclear weapons. Lessing who at 87 is the oldest person to win the Nobel Literature prize, is the second British writer to have been awarded the prize in the last three years: in 2005 it was Harold Pinter. The awards, each worth 1.5 million US dollars, will be handed out by Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10. This week medicine, chemistry and physics prizes were awarded and peace and economics are to be announced October 15. In an interview last year Lessing said that "when you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s, what I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British Empireâ€Ã‚¦nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?"