The author of The Golden Notebook and The Grass Is Singing as well as the winner of the British Nobel Prize, Doris Lessing passed away. She was ninety four years old.
A statement from her publisher, Harper Collins, said, “She passed away peacefully at her London home in the early hours of this morning.” Her daughter Jean and granddaughters Anna and Susannah survive her. Lessing had two children with her first husband, Frank Wisdom, whom she married in 1939. But she left the family home and the couple divorced in 1943.
She then re-married and had a son with the German communist Gottfried Lessing in 1945. They divorced in 1949 and she moved to England with her son Peter.
She was the eleventh woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature and was known for her fierce intellect way of story telling. She became the oldest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, when in 2007 she won the award for her life’s work at the age of eighty eight.
Her best known works include The Golden Notebook, Memoirs of a Survivor and The Summer Before the Dark. Born in what is now Iran, she moved to Southern Rhodesia – now Zimbabwe – as a child before settling in England in 1949.
Her debut novel The Grass is Singing was published in 1950 and she made her breakthrough with The Golden Notebook in 1962. The Golden Notebook was seen as her pioneering work.
On winning the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy described Lessing as one of the best known female writers who has the fire and visionary power.
After learning that she had won the award, Lessing said that she was very glad. She even recalled that in the 1960’s, she had been told that the Nobel Prize committee did not like her and she would never win a Nobel Prize.
The content of her other novels ranged from semi-autobiographical African experiences to social and political struggle, psychological thrillers and science fiction.
