Nobel Prize-Winning Novelist Doris Lessing Dies Aged 94

[Ron Burgundy]

By Kevin Liffey LONDON (Reuters) - The novelist Doris Lessing, who tackled race, ideology, gender politics and the workings of the psyche in a prolific and often iconoclastic career, died in London on Sunday at the age of 94, her publisher HarperCollins said. The British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie hailed the "warmth, sharp mind and ferocity" of a writer who continually reinvented herself to challenge conventions, but defied the feminists and leftists who would have claimed her for their cause. Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, only the 11th woman to do so, but characteristically refused to offer the expected gushing response on hearing the news, observing drily: "One can get more excited than one gets, you know." Born in what was then Persia, now Iran, on October 22, 1919, Lessing was raised in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. When she moved to Britain at 30, escaping the scene of an unhappy childhood and two failed marriages, she had in her suitcase the manuscript of a novel that broke new ground with its depiction of an inter-racial relationship in her white-ruled homeland.

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