Doris Lessing

Lessing was born in Persia to British parents and raised on a failing maize farm in Southern Rhodesia, leaving school at fourteen and, later, two failed marriages; she left two young children with her first husband when she departed for London in 1949 with the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing in her luggage. She had joined the Communist Party in Rhodesia and remained one in London until the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 broke her allegiance.

The Golden Notebook (1962), splitting a woman's fractured life across four color-coded notebooks, became a landmark of formal experiment and was claimed by a feminist movement she viewed with some wariness. She later turned to speculative fiction and Sufi mysticism. In 2007, at eighty-eight, she learned of her Nobel Prize from reporters waiting outside her house and greeted the news with a famously deadpan 'Oh Christ.' She died in London in 2013.