Novelist Doris Lessing today became the oldest person to win the Nobel Prize for literature, aged 87.
The Swedish Academy, which decides on the prestigious 10 million Swedish Krona (€1.09 million) award, said Lessing was an "epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".
Doris Lessing. Photo: AP Photo/Martin Cleaver
Lessing's latest novel The Cleft depicts a world without men.
Born Doris may Taylor in Iran (then Persia) in 1919, she moved to Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) in 1925 with her family.
The experience of being a colonist informed her early work as she sensitively chronicled the dull lives of settlers and the tribulations of the natives. Her debut novel in 1950 was The Grass is Singing, a love tragedy about the relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black servant.
She recalled her experience in the first part of her 1994 autobiography Under My Skin.
She married her second husband, Gottfried Lessing, a German Jew she met at a Marxist group mainly concerned with racism. She divorced him four years later and moved to London and joined the Communist Party.
During this time she also quickly established herself as a writer and in the 50s a campaigner against nuclear weapons. She was banned form both Rhodesia and South Africa because of her outspoken critcism of apartheid.
A series of novels in the 50s and 60s maintained the African setting but moved onto more general themes of women' s liberation.
Her 1962 work The Golden Notebookwas breakthrough for her and achieved an iconic status among the burgeoning feminist movement. It was also stylistically innnovative adopting some of the devices which later came to be a charachteristic of postmodernism.
Her ambitious approach to literature continued and she later began writing science fiction. During this time and thereafter, her interest in the mystic, Islamic tradition of Sufism began to surface.
She has continued writing prolifically producing novels in each of the last three years.