Dori Lessing, a Nobel Prize winning author, has died. She was 94, and perhaps most well-known for her novel The Golden Notebook.
Her books were known to reflect her journeys across the former British empire. She was born Doris May Tayler in 1919 in Persia, what is now Iran.
Her travels certainly helped shaped her writing, and she also moved to Zimbabwe, at the age of 5, and lived there until the age of 29.
As she lived a long life, Lessing enjoyed a successful career, and one that included winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007.
She died in her home of London, England, and her career stretched from 1950-2008. In addition to being a successful novelist, Lessing was also a poet, playwright, biographer, and short story writer. She moved to Britain at the age of 30, after becoming disillusioned with the communist movement.
Lessing wrote with the well-known publishing company Harper Collins. Nicholas Pearson, her editor said of her passing “Doris has been called a visionary and, to be in her company, which was a privilege I had as her editor towards the end of her writing life, was to experience something of that. Even in very old age she was always intellectually restless, reinventing herself, curious about the changing world around us, always completely inspirational. We’ll miss her hugely.”
Sad to hear of the death of Doris Lessing Companion of Literature and Fellow of the RSL she will be dearly missed.
— RSL (@RSLiterature) November 17, 2013
Heartbroken for the death of Doris Lessing, the author I chose to write my dissertation on.
— Grazia Spina (@GraziaSpina) November 18, 2013
At the time that she was awarded her Nobel Prize, she said that she was not surprised, and gave a bit of an odd response when saying “I’m 88 years old and they can’t give the Nobel to someone who’s dead, so I think they were probably thinking they’d probably better give it to me now before I’ve popped off.” However, we all know that kind of thing can happen, and actors often receive Oscar seemingly for the same reason, some would argue.
Lessing’s famous work, The Golden Notebook, was published in 1962, and centered around Anna Wulf, who uses four notebooks to bring together the separate parts of her disintegrating life. In addition, she has written over 55 works of fiction, opera, nonfiction, and poetry.
Only finding out about Doris Lessing's death now. Sorry I haven't read more of her.
— Laura King (@diesforchicken) November 18, 2013
Doris Lessing died peacefully, and while her family has requested her privacy, the exact cause of death is still unknown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS01_jB83yY
Image via Youtube