Happy Birthday, Doris Lessing, Social Commentator and Nobel Prize Winner in Literature

The writer Doris Lessing, at the age of 89, received the most significant award in world literature: the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel judging committee called her an “epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire, and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.” While this popular novelist and social commentator has won dozens of other prizes, the prestige of the Nobel outweighs all the rest.

Explore the life of Doris Lessing with the British Web site Contemporary Writers, a source for many author biographies and bibliographies. Lessing’s page also includes an author statement and a list of all the prizes she has won and been nominated for.

Hear Lessing’s reaction to winning the Nobel in a telephone interview with the Nobel committee following the announcement. Lessing is only the 11th woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In a new feature by The New York Times, important figures like Lessing are given their own topic page, including a biography, links to all Lessing book reviews The Times has published over the years, relevant articles, letters to the editor, and op-eds.

A Web site honoring Lessing and her work, created by an avid reader, has more than a dozen free audio excerpts of Lessing being interviewed and reading from her work. There are also a couple of videos of readings.

On Celestial Timepiece, an extensive Joyce Carol Oates Web resource, you can find Oates’s 1972 essay, “A Visit with Doris Lessing.” Lessing had just published Briefing for a Descent into Hell. She and Oates discuss contemporary thinkers and Oates reflects on meeting Lessing and visiting her home.

In 2005 Lessing gave a lecture at the art gallery Tate Britain in London, part of a series that discusses writers’ connections to visual culture. Lessing focuses on painting and how visual art has affected her writing.

The BBC Four Web page has audio interviews with hundreds of authors, including several brief segments with Doris Lessing.

In a 1997 interview with Salon magazine, Lessing and interviewer Dwight Garner discuss the sexual revolution, political correctness, the Cold War, and the publishing process.

Guardian writer Xan Brooks recently interviewed Lessing at the Hay literature festival, where they discussed her most recent book, The Cleft, published this year.

Bill Moyers’ 2003 interview with Lessing sheds light on her writing process, the self-proclaimed “neurotic” quality of needing to write continually, the effect of being a child of World War I, the impact of the sixties, and the buildup to the war in Iraq (which began two months after this interview took place).