NOBEL: LESSING WINS MORE

Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

....Because of her outspoken views, the governments of both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa declared her a “prohibited alien” in 1956.—The New York Times

"When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s," she told the AP in an interview a year ago. "What I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire — nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?"—NPR

I do have different kinds of readers. Some of them hate, for example, my so-called science fiction, and others hate my realistic fiction, and so on, and so on. I was once in San Francisco when in the audience, a man stood up and said, "I hope you're not gonna waste any more time writing your realistic fiction." And then, somebody else stood up, and said, "I hope you're not going to waste any more time writing science fiction." And they got into bitter argument, and I just sat and listened.—PBS

Lessing herself, who was shopping at the time of the Nobel announcement, was less reverent in her response to the news. "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot," she said to the reporters gathered outside her home in north London. "It's a royal flush."—Guardian Unlimited