Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing (Doris May Tayler, 22 October 1919 - 17 November 2013) was a British writer. In 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Reporters told Doris that she had won the Nobel prize and they asked her "Are you not surprised?". She said she had already "won every other European literature prize" so winning prizes was normal.
Early life
Lessing was born in Iran on 22 October 1919. Her parents were both English. They met at the Royal Free Hospital. Her father, Captain Alfred Tayler, was a patient because he had lost his leg in World War I. Her mother, Emily Maude Tayler (maiden name McVeagh), was a nurse.
Alfred Tayler and his wife moved to Kermanshah, Iran. He started a job there as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia. Doris was born here in 1919. Later, the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe) in 1925 to farm maize.
Lessing studied at the Dominican Convent High School in Salisbury (now Harare). It was a Roman Catholic convent school for girls. She left school aged 14, and taught herself after that. She left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid. She started reading about politics and sociology and began writing around this time. In 1937, Lessing moved to Salisbury to work as a telephone operator. She soon married her first husband, Frank Wisdom. They had two children (John and Jean), before the marriage ended in 1943. She took care of future author Jenny Diski after her parents abused her. Diski lived with Lessing for four years in London.
After her divorce, Lessing became more involved with members of the Left Book Club. She had joined this communist book club the year before. She met her second husband, Gottfried Lessing there. They married soon after she joined the group, and had a child named Peter. This marriage ended in divorce in 1949. Gottfried Lessing later became the East German ambassador to Uganda. He was murdered in the 1979 rebellion against Idi Amin Dada.
She went to London to pursue her writing career and communist ideals. Lessing left two young children with their father in South Africa. Peter, from her second marriage, went with her. She later said that she thought she had no choice at that time. She felt she had done the best she could and that she was not the best person to raise the children. She would have been very frustrated like her mother had been because it was diificult for an intelligent woman to spend all of her time with young children.
Archive
The largest collection of Lessing's writing is at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, at the University of Texas at Austin. There are 45 boxes of Lessing's materials at the Ransom Center that contain nearly all of her available manuscripts and typescripts up to 1999. Lessing kept none of the originals of her early manuscripts. Other institutions, including the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa, hold smaller collections.
Death
During the late 1990s, Lessing suffered a stroke which stopped her from travelling during her later years and focused her mind on death. Lessing died on 17 November 2013 at her home in London, aged 94.
Awards
Somerset Maugham Award (1954)
Prix Medicis etranger (1976)
Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1981)
Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F. V. S., Hamburg (1982)
W. H. Smith Literary Award (1986)
Palermo Prize (1987)
Premio Internazionale Mondello (1987)
Premio Grinzane Cavour (1989)
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography (1995)
Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1995)
Premi Internacional Catalunya (1999)
Order of the Companions of Honour (1999)
Companion of Literature of the Royal Society of Literature (2000)
David Cohen Prize (2001)
Premio Principe de Asturias (2001)
S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award (2002)
Nobel Prize in Literature (2007)
Works
Novels
The Grass is Singing (1950)
Retreat to Innocence (1956)
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971)
The Summer Before the Dark (1973)
Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
The Diary of a Good Neighbour (as Jane Somers, 1983)
If the Old Could... (as Jane Somers, 1984)
The Good Terrorist (1985)
The Fifth Child (1988)
Love, Again (1996)
Mara and Dann (1999)
Ben, in the World (2000) - sequel to The Fifth Child
The Sweetest Dream (2001)
The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005) - sequel to Mara and Dann
The Cleft (2007)
Alfred and Emily (2008)
The Children of Violence series
Martha Quest (1952)
A Proper Marriage (1954)
A Ripple from the Storm (1958)
Landlocked (1965)
The Four-Gated City (1969)
Canopus in Argos: Archives series
Shikasta (1979)
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980)
The Sirian Experiments (1980)
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982)
The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983)
Opera libretti
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (opera)|The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (music by Philip Glass, 1986)
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (music by Philip Glass, 1997)
Comics
Playing the Game (graphic novel illustrated by Charlie Adlard, 1995)
Drama
Each His Own Wilderness (three plays, 1959)
Play with a Tiger (1962)
Poetry
Fourteen Poems (1959)
The Wolf People - INPOPA Anthology 2002 (poems by Lessing, Robert Twigger and T.H. Benson, 2002)
Short story collections
Five Short Novels (1953)
The Habit of Loving (1957)
A Man and Two Women (1963)
African Stories (1964)
Winter in July (1966)
The Black Madonna (1966)
The Story of a Non-Marrying Man (1972)
This Was the Old Chief's Country: Collected African Stories, Vol. 1 (1973)
The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories, Vol. 2 (1973)
To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories, Vol. 1 (1978)
The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories, Vol. 2 (1978)
Through the Tunnel (1990)
London Observed: Stories and Sketches (1992)
The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches (1992)
Spies I Have Known (1995)
The Pit (1996)
The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels (2003)
Cat Tales
Particularly Cats (stories and nonfiction, 1967)
Particularly Cats and Rufus the Survivor (stories and nonfiction, 1993)
The Old Age of El Magnifico (stories and nonfiction, 2000)
On Cats (2002) - omnibus edition containing the above three books
Autobiography and memoirs
Going Home (memoir, 1957)
African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (memoir, 1992)
Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 (1994)
Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 to 1962 (1997)
Other nonfiction
In Pursuit of the English (1960)
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (essays, 1987)
The Wind Blows Away Our Words (1987)
A Small Personal Voice (essays, 1994)
Conversations (interviews, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 1994)
Putting the Questions Differently (interviews, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 1996)
Time Bites (essays, 2004)
On Not Winning the Nobel Prize (Nobel Lecture, 2007, published 2008)
References
1919 births
2013 deaths
English autobiographers
Companions of Honour
Royal Society of Literature
Booker Prize winners
British Nobel Prize winners
British communists
British feminists
English novelists
English playwrights
English poets
English science fiction writers
British socialists
Nobel Prize in Literature winners
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
Writers from London