Doris Lessing: Nobeled at 87.

The Nobel Academy announced British Novelist Doris Lessing as the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature. This makes her the 11th woman to win this coveted prize and the 34th woman to win Nobel in any category ever since the prize was announced in 1901. The award comes with a 10 million Swedish crown honorarium, about $1.6 million.

Lessing has garnered acclaim for her deeply autobiographical writings reflecting feminist issues relating to society and politics. Her novels most notably ‘The Grass is Singing’ and ‘The Golden Notebook’ weave political and sexual themes into a complex narrative. In her novels she deals with issues ranging from but not limited to racism, communism, terrorism and environmental destruction. Her first novel The Grass is Singing (1950) and it was an instant bestseller. It was the story of the wife of a white farmer and her affair with an African servant, the book broke new ground, both in terms of its outlining of an interracial relationship and in the sheer detail Lessing gave to her characters' internal lives.

She has also produced startling works, such as the semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), a frightening and surreal examination of mental illness. By the late 1970s, Lessing left the African-themed novel behind and moved into science fiction.

More recently, Lessing has produced novels like The Good Terrorist (1985), a satire on romantic politics, and The Fifth Child (1988), about the havoc wreaked on a family by an antisocial and violent child. Her latest work, The Cleft, is a sci-fi novel which imagines what happens to a mythical all-female world when men are introduced.

At 87, she is the oldest person to have received the literature prize and the second oldest Nobel Laureate in any category.