Life of Doris Lessing Doris Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran), Kermanshah, on October 22, 1919. She is a British writer. Both of her parents were British. They are Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler. Her father, lost a leg during his service in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia. Her mother was a nurse. In 1925, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for getting rich through maize farming. But this did not help them. Lessing’s childhood was an uneven mixture of some pleasure and much pain. Her mother was very caring with raising her daughter properly. She enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home. She then joined Doris in a convent school. Lessing was later sent to an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out. Her formal education ended at the age of thirteen. But Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual. The parcels of books ordered from London fed her imagination. Lessing's early reading included Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, and Kipling; later she discovered D.H. Lawrence, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Bedtime stories also nurtured her youth. Lessing left home when she was fifteen and took a job as a nursemaid. Her employer gave her books on politics and sociology to read. She fought against the biological and cultural imperatives. Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of “setting at a distance, taking the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, and the unexamined, into the realm of the general”. In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and had two children. She felt that she was trapped by marriage. So she left her family. She was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists “who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read”. Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group. Shortly after she joined, they got married and had a son. Lessing became disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left it in 1954. By 1949, Lessing moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel “The Grass Is Singing”
and began her career as a professional writer. Lessing's fiction stories are the results of her experiences in Africa. Lessing wrote about the clash of cultures, the injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements, and the conflict between the individuals. Her stories and novels published during the fifties and early sixties, explains about the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials. In 1956, in response to Lessing's courageous outspokenness, she was declared as a prohibited person in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. At that time Lessing published “The Golden Notebook”. Lessing's fiction is commonly divided into three distinct phases:
1. The Communist theme (1944-1956)
2. The psychological theme (1956-1969)
3. The Sufi theme
In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from “Harvard University” Also in 1995; she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. But, she is welcomed now as a writer to the place which she was banned to enter 40 years ago. She collaborated with illustrator Charlie Adlard to create the unique and unusual graphic novel, Playing the Game. After being out of print in the U.S. for more than 30 years, Going Home and In Pursuit of the English were republished by HarperCollins in 1996. These two fascinating and important books give rare insight into Mrs. Lessing's personality, life and views. In 1996, her first novel in 7 years,
Love Again, was published by HarperCollins. She did not make any personal efforts to promote the book. In an interview she describes the frustration she felt during a 14-week worldwide tour to promote her autobiography. “I told my publishers it would be far more useful for everyone if I stayed at home, writing another book. But they wouldn't listen. I said I would not move from my house and would do only one interview”. And the honors keep on coming: she was on the list of nominees for the Nobel Prize for Literature and Britain's Writer's Guild Award for Fiction in 1996. In 1997 she collaborated with Philip Glass for the second time. Then her new novel, titled “Mara and Dann” was published in the U.S in January 1999 and in the U.K. in April 1999. In an interview in the London Daily Telegraph she said, “I adore writing it. I'll be so sad when it's finished. It's freed my mind”. In May 1999, she was presented with the XI Annual International Catalunya Award, an award by the government of Catalunya. Lessing was appointed a Companion of Honour, an exclusive order for those who have done “conspicuous national service”. In January, 2000 the National Portrait Gallery in London unveiled Leonard McComb's portrait of Doris Lessing. In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain's most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom. She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize. In 2005 she was on the shortlist for the first Man Booker International Prize. Her most recent novel is “The Cleft”. She got Nobel Prize for that book. The prize is worth £765,000 ($1.2million). At 87 she is the oldest person ever to win the literature award. She is the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy in its 106-year history.
Here are some of the awards she got
· Somerset Maugham Award(1954)
· Prix Medicis etranger(1976)
· Osterreichischer Staatspreis fur Europaische Litterature(1981)
· Shakespeare-Preis der Alfred Toepfer stitung F.V.S., Hamburg(1982)
· W.H.Smith Literary Award(1986)
· Palermo Prize (1987)
· Premio Internazionale Mondello (1987)
· Premio Grinzane Cavour (1989) they
· Los Angeles Times Book Prize(1995)
· Premio Internacional Catalunya (1999)
· Order of the Companions of Honour (1999)
· Companion of Literature of the Royal Society of Literature (2000)
· David Cohen British Literary Prize (2001)
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Premio PrÃncipe de Asturias (2001)
· S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award (2002)
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Nobel Prize in Literature (2007)
About her latest novel “The Cleft”:
In the last years of his life, a thoughtful Roman senator starts on one last epic work, to retell the history of human creation and reveal the little-known story of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic coastal wilderness. The Clefts have neither need nor knowledge of men; childbirth is controlled there, and they bear only female children. But with the unexpected birth of a strange new child-a boy-the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into danger.
In this interesting story, Lessing takes on the themes that inspired much of her early writing: how men and women manage to live side by side in the world and how the troublesome particulars of gender affect every aspect of our existence.
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