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LONDON - Novelist Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature today for a body of work that looked unflinchingly at society's ills and inspired a generation of feminist writers.
Lessing, who found out about her Nobel Prize from reporters waiting outside her home, said it gave her the "royal flush" of prizes for writing.
"I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one," she said as she stepped out of a taxi carrying groceries. "I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot...It's a royal flush."
The Swedish Academy, which awards the 10 million crown (NZ$2m) prize, called the 87-year-old an "epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".
The oldest person to win a Nobel for literature, Lessing was only the 34th female laureate since the prizes began in 1901 and the 11th woman to take the literature award.
Sitting on the step outside her front door, the telephone ringing constantly behind her, the feisty 87-year-old issued a stern anti-war message and described how she had once been told by an official that she would never win the Nobel Prize.
"People who have never even heard of me will now go out and buy my books," she told about a dozen reporters and cameramen crammed into her tiny front garden. "It's a very nice thing. So now I'm going to earn some money."
Asked how she heard about the prize today she added: "Only now, when I arrived.
"I took my son to the hospital and I've been on the Heath so I didn't know until there were photographers," she added, referring to London park Hampstead Heath.
"I thought you were photographing the street for some television serial or something like that."
Lessing revealed how she was once approached by an official connected with the Nobel Prize at a formal reception in Sweden who told her she would never win the award.
"I hope their manners have changed," she said, referring to the Nobel organisers.
"Can you imagine the scene? (With) my Swedish publisher at a very, very formal dinner ... an official, he said, 'I've come to tell you you will never win the Nobel Prize,' and I hadn't asked for it, you know," she said.
"Can you imagine the cheek? What am I to say? 'Oh dear, I'm so sorry, why don't you like me?"'
CONSIDERED DECISION
Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said Lessing's work had been of great importance to other writers and to the broader field of literature.
"She has been a subject for discussion (by the academy) for quite some time, and now the moment was right. Perhaps we could say that she is one of the most carefully considered decisions in the history of the Nobel Prize," he told Reuters after announcing Lessing had won.
"She has opened up a new area of experience that earlier had not been very accepted in literature. That has to do with, for instance, female sexuality."
Academics and writers called the honour well deserved.
"She is a great figure, she certainly deserved it," fellow novelist Umberto Eco, whose books include the successful Name of the Rose, said at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Jane Friedman, chief executive of Lessing publisher HarperCollins, called the Nobel a complete surprise.
"This is absolutely extraordinary," she told Reuters in Frankfurt. "She has been an icon for women for a lifetime."
Lessing, born to British parents in what is now Iran on October 22, 1919, was raised in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
She went to a convent boarding school at the age of seven and later moved to a girls' school in Salisbury, Rhodesia. After ending her formal schooling at 14, she worked variously as a nanny, telephonist, office worker and journalist.
Her debut as a novelist came in 1950 with The Grass is Singing, a book that examined the relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black servant.
Her 1962 work The Golden Notebook was widely considered her breakthrough.
"The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th century view of the male-female relationship," the academy said in its citation.
NEW WORK
Lessing said her next book, Alfred and Emily, was an anti-war book dedicated to her parents, who were damaged by their experiences of World War One.
"I've written a book about my parents, who were very much damaged by World War One, as if there was no World War One. I've given them lives, ordinary, decent lives without war.
"In the second half is what actually happened to them in the war and actually it's pretty painful if you contrast the kind of lives they might have had with what actually happened to them."
She said her father was wounded just before the 1917 Battle of Passchendaele, and he suffered for the rest of his life.
"My father, months before he died, he used to lie in bed reciting the names of his men who died at Passchendaele."
Lessing had a warning for younger Europeans who had not lived through war and a message for political leaders today who started conflicts.
"I hope (something) can change the minds of people who govern us, anything that will prevent any war anywhere, because we know what it's like and you people do not know what it's like."
She sent the manuscript of Alfred and Emily to her agent recently, and he described the last 200 pages as "unbearably painful". "Good. Let them be unbearably painful, so people know a bit what war can really be like."
Lessing said that "some very good people" had refused Nobel Prizes in the past. When asked if she might do the same, she quipped: "I hadn't thought about it. Do you think I should refuse it? I'll go and think about it very seriously now. OK?"
This was the fourth of this year's crop of Nobel prizes, handed out annually for achievements in science, literature, economics and peace.
The winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize will be announced tomorrow in Oslo.
- REUTERS
