Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize For Literature

Posted on October 12, 2007

88 year-old British author Doris Lessing has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although has written 50 books, she is best known for The Golden Notebook, published in 1962. The book is considered a pioneering work on male-female relations, that helped inspire the burgeoning feminist movement. Doris' reaction to the winning the vaunted literary prize was pretty hilarious.

Doris Lessing was out grocery shopping near her home in London yesterday when the Swedish Academy announced she had won the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature. She returned from the store to find a media circus, the wire services reported.
"Oh Christ!" she said, when told about the monumental honor. "I couldn't care less."
"This has been going on for 30 years," Lessing told the journalists. "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush."

Lessing also said at a news conference: "I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. . . . 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."

Typically, Harold Bloom weighed in by dismissing Lessing as a "fourth rate science fiction author." He said she had some good stuff early in her career, but he didn't like any of her "second wave" of work. But that's Harold for you -- he never has a good word to say about anyone's work but his own.