DORIS LESSING

Hi readers! Today i´m going to talk about the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature 2007, she was called Doris Lessing. I have chosen this person, because she´s one of the few women who had received Nobel Prizes, and while I was looking for the literature ones, I found it and it looked interesting.

She was born on 22 October 1919, Kermanshah, Persia. She was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist biographer and short story writer.
Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Doris also in 2001 was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published in 1950. Her breakthrough work, The Golden Notebook, was written in 1962. By the time of her death, more than 50 of her novels had been published.

In 1982, Lessing tried to publish two novels under a pseudonym, Jane Somers, to show the difficulty new authors faced in trying to have their works in print. The novels were declined by Lessing's UK publisher, but later were accepted by another English publisher, Michael Joseph. The Diary of a Good Neighbour was published in Britain and the US in 1983, and If the Old Could in both countries in 1984, both as written by Jane Somers. In 1984, both novels were re-published in both countries, this time under one cover, with the title The Diaries of Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could, listing Doris Lessing as author.


Here you have a video showing the moment when gave the prize to Doris. When reporters in 2007 told Ms. Lessing that she had won the Nobel Prize for literature, she said, “I couldn’t care less.”