Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing was born in Persia of British parents in 1919. She spent her childhood on her father's farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia. After leaving school at 14 she worked in a variety of jobs including typist, au pair and telephonist, maintaining her interest in writing all the while. Upon arrival in England in 1949 her first novel 'The Grass is Singing' was published (and was subsequently filmed in 1981). In 1952 the publishing of 'Martha Quest' marked the first in her famous sequence of five novels 'Children of Violence' which ended with 'The Four-Gated City' (1969).

Ms Lessing's collection of short novels called 'Five' earned her the Somerset Maugham Award for 1954 and her play 'Play With a Tiger' was presented in the West End in 1962. The French translation of 'The Golden Notebook' (1962) won the Prix Medici in 1976. In 1982 she received the Austrian State Prize for Literature and the Shakespeare Prize, Hamburg. Doris Lessing has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times: 'Briefing for a Descent into Hell' (1971), 'The Sirian Experiments' (1981) and 'The Good Terrorist' (1985) and won the W H Smith Award in 1985. In August 1991, she received an honorary title of Distinguished Fellow in Literature in the School of English and American Studies conferred by University of East Anglia.