BBC
KERMANSHAH, IRAN-British Nobel-Prize winning author Doris Lessing has died aged 94. Her best-known works included The Golden Notebook, Memoirs of a Survivor and The Summer Before the Dark.
She became the oldest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature when in 2007 she won the award for her life’s work aged 88. 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. On winning the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy described Lessing as an “epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”. After learning she had won the award, she said she was “very glad” but recalled that in the 1960s she had been told the Nobel Prize committee did not like her and she would never win one.
“So now they’ve decided they’re going to give it to me. So why? I mean, why do they like me any better now than they did then?” she said. The Swedish Academy said the Golden Notebook was seen as “a pioneering work” that “belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th Century view of the male-female relationship”. She distanced herself from the feminist movement.
The content of her other novels ranged from semi-autobiographical African experiences to social and political struggle, psychological thrillers and science fiction. She 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 married and had a son with the German communist Gottfried Lessing in 1945.  However, they divorced in 1949 and she moved to England with her son Peter.