Doris Lessing: An Uncomfortable Nobel Prize

British literature has been blessed again with the Nobel Prize. This time, as it happened two years ago with Harold Pinter, this has been a polemical decision. Her victory over other shortlisted authors such as Vargas Llosa or Philip Roth was not welcome by everybody. Critics like Harold Bloom considered it as “politically correct”.
This feminist writer was born in Persia (Iran) from British parents and moved to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) at a short age. She was sent to a strict religious school and was unable to finish so she became a self-made intellectual. She moved to Salisbury where she married Frank Wisdom at the age of nineteen and later to London. She published her first novel “The Grass Is Singing” in 1949.
She has published many novels, short stories, poems and plays. She became a feminism icon, as she was one of the first writers who described female’s inner psychology and wrote about topics which were considered taboo in those years. At 88, the oldest person who has ever been awarded the literature Nobel Prize, she continues her intellectual activity. She has also won other important awards as the Principe de Asturias or the Somerset Maugham Award of the Society of Authors. Her most recent novel, “The Cleft”, is from 2007.
Woman (the eleventh one who received the prize against 104 men), inconformist, polemical and feminist, Doris Lessing can be, as her co-peace-award-winner Al Gore would say an “uncomfortable Nobel” which more than one will regret.