Doris Lessing - a writer full of 'fire and visionary power' - dies at the age of 94
The British writer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, but the author of The Golden Notebook said she couldn't care less
Doris Lessing
1919-2013
Doris Lessing, the Nobel prize-winning, free-thinking, world-travelling and often polarising author of The Golden Notebook and dozens of other novels that reflected her own improbable journey across the former British empire, died yesterday. She was 94.
Her publisher, HarperCollins, said the author of more than 55 works of fiction, opera, nonfiction and poetry, died peacefully. The exact cause of death was not clear.
Lessing explored topics ranging from colonial Africa to dystopian Britain, from the mystery of being female to the unknown worlds of science fiction.
She won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007. The Swedish Academy praised Lessing for her "scepticism, fire and visionary power". When informed about winning the prize outside her London home she responded: "Oh Christ! ... I couldn't care less." That was typical of the irascible, independent Lessing. The targets of her vocal ire in recent years included former President George W. Bush - "a world calamity" - and modern women - "smug, self-righteous".
She remains best known for The Golden Notebook, in which heroine Anna Wulf uses four notebooks to bring together the separate parts of her disintegrating life. The novel covers a range of previously unmentionable female conditions - menstruation, orgasms and frigidity - and made Lessing an icon for women's liberation.