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Author Doris Lessing on Thursday won the Nobel Literature Prize for her epic literary works that cover feminism, politics and her youth in Zimbabwe. The Nobel Prize jury describes her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”.
Lessing blazed the trail with her first novel, “The Grass is Singing” in 1950, chronicling the relationship between a white farmer’s wife and her black servant. In her earliest work she drew upon her childhood experiences in colonial Rhodesia to write about the clash of white and African cultures and racial injustice. She criticized the white colonialists for a sterile culture and for dispossessing native black citizens.

Before last night’s announcement, Lessing, 87, was not among 54 writers listed as being in the running by British betting agency Ladbrokes. Leading contenders for the $1.7million prize, according to the agency, included Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates from the US, Japan’s Haruki Murakami and Australia’s Les Murray.

Doris Lessing was born in 1919 in Persia – modern-day Iran – to British parents, moving as a child with her family to southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where she stayed in school only to the age of 14.
The author, whose father was a bank clerk and whose mother was a nurse, never finished high school, but she read voraciously as a child. She was briefly married in 1937 and had two children, but later left her family.
During a lengthy career, Lessing is known for having been a beacon of inspiration to a generation of feminists. “The Golden Notebook,” published in 1962, told the story of Anna Wulf, a fiercely independent woman who challenged convention.
The growing feminist movement in America and Europe saw the title as a pioneering book that now belongs “to the handful of works that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship,” the academy said.

At 87, Doris lessing is the oldest Nobel Literature laureate since the first prizes were awarded in 1901. Each Nobel Prize is this year accompanied by a check for approximately $1.4 million.
Publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair say winning the prize can have a massive effect on sales — if the author is the right type. “What is important is that in the country that the author comes from they are already quite well known – then it has the effect of a ‘new wave’,” said Martina Wachendorff, editor at French publishing house Actes Sud, which has had two laureates in recent years.