The Nobel Prize winning novelist Doris Lessing regarded as one of the greatest writers in theEnglish language has died. She was 94 and attributed much of her success to her experiencesas a child.
"If you had a kind of bleakness in your childhood which I had, you'll never lose it. It doesn'tmatter if you've been given 15,000 prizes."
The deputy head of the Libya intelligence services has been kidnapped. Our correspondentin Tripoli tells us why.
From ship to shore, the latest on the efforts to help the victims of typhoon Haiyan. Ourcorrespondent Alastair Leithead is off the Philippine island of Cebu.
"Aid is arriving on board and it'll soon be setting sail off the coast to deliver aid to thoseremote villages, to those people they most need it."
The Nobel Prize winning novelist Doris Lessing regarded as one of the greatest writers in theEnglish language has died. She was 94. Doris Lessing was brought up in Zimbabwe which wasthen Southern Rhodesia but came to London in 1949. Her work ranged from social realism toscience fiction, class conflict to mental breakdown. Doris Lessing was appointed a Companionof Honor in the New Year's Honor's List in 2000.
"When her reputation was long established, she caused embarrassment when shesubmitted one book under a pseudonym and had it rejected by several publishers. Rebellionsurfaced early. As a child on her parents' farm in Southern Rhodesia, she was disgusted by theway whites treated blacks. Doris Lessing left home at 14 to work as a nurse maid. Two brokenmarriages and three children followed before she arrived in London in 1949. She worked as ashort-time typist for a year before she found a publisher for The Grass is Singing. Perhaps thebest known was The Golden Notebook in an attempt to illuminate the socialist thinking of herday although she felt it had been far too ambitious to succeed. She rejected the labels criticsattempted to attach to her. She was able to put most of the traumatic elements of her life intoperspective, but could never escape from the wounds of childhood. "
"If you had a kind of bleakness in your childhood which I had, you'll never lose it. It doesn'tmatter if you've been given 15,000 prizes."
"Doris Lessing said she was very glad about being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature,particularly as she had been told 40 years previously that the Nobel hierarchy didn't like her."
