Word power

DORIS Lessing is a name we have grown up with. Who she is, though, is hard to define. The once-communist radical and author of what became a feminist bible shuns feminism and the fanaticism of ideology. Her early novels were steeped in the savage realism of apartheid in her African homeland. Later she would explore the fantasies, or inner realism, of ''space fiction''.

Lessing, now 74, remains tirelessly dedicated to her art. Books have been her life. She was in Hong Kong this week to give a series of talks about her work and the novel at the invitation of the British Council.

The woman who grew up in colonial and rural Africa seemed strangely out of place in Britain's last and most vibrant colony. Only the street names had a familiar ring.

While unsure how to relate to the foreign culture in which she found herself en-route to a literary festival in New Zealand, she still had that writer's hunger for information about her surroundings, in particular for that which obviously meant most to her, its nature - the species of the bird that was singing or the identity of the cotton trees on Cotton Tree Drive.

Doris Lessing is one of the most diverse and prolific of writers. With more than 35 books to her name, including novels, fiction, short stories, poetry, non-fiction and even a comic, written in a vast range of genres, one can be forgiven for not knowingher as one might other modern writers such as Rushdie or Kundera.

She has been closely identified with the battle against apartheid in southern Africa and, rather to her embarrassment since she has little time for the ''men hating'' and ''over-politicised'' feminist movement, as a first exponent of feminist literature.