Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing was a British novelist, poet, playwright and short story writer, born on 22 October 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia, now Iran. She spent much of her childhood on a farm in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and left school at fourteen. Her early life in the colony shaped her first fiction and her lasting concern with race, colonial power and unequal societies. In 1949 she moved to London, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Her work ranges from realist novels about women's lives and political disillusion to inner-space fiction and science fiction. She wrote about the pressures of family, ideology and the mind with unusual frankness, and The Golden Notebook became a landmark for readers of many backgrounds. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 and died on 17 November 2013.