'Visionary' Lessing's Nobel prize

According to the academy's citation, her writing uses "scepticism, fire and visionary power" to subject "a divided civilization to scrutiny".

Ms Lessing, who turns 88 later this month, was born in Persia - now Iran - and grew up in Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe.

Her reaction: "They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off."

Judges described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".

But she is not as well-known as the playwright Harold Pinter, Britain's last winner in 2005.

A spokesman for Lessing admitted she did not get the news as soon as it was announced because "she had just popped to the shops" but her long-standing agent Jonathan Clowes said: "It's very well deserved and we're absolutely delighted."

Lessing was born Doris May Taylor in Persia, now known as Iran, and later moved to Zimbabwe with her parents. She described her experience on a farm there in the first part of her autobiography Under My Skin, written in 1994.

Her mother worked as a nurse, while her father was a bank official and former captain in the British army during the First World War. She left school at 14 after a spell at a girls' school in Salisbury.

She married her first husband in 1939 and they had two children but divorced four years later.

In 1945, she married Gottfried Lessing, a German-Jewish immigrant she met at a Marxist group. When they divorced in 1949, she moved to London. By then she had already worked as a nanny, telephonist, office worker, stenographer and journalist.

Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published in 1950, drawing on her experiences in Africa as she wrote about the relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black servant.

She also wrote the semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series, which was largely set in Africa.

Politically, she criticised the regime in South Africa and was banned from entering the country until 1995. She was also involved in the Southern Rhodesia Labour Party and was banned from entering there after a brief visit in 1956.

She enjoyed literary success when The Golden Notebook was published in 1962. The novel tells the story of a divorced writer with a young daughter and it was held in high regard by the feminist movement.

The Nobel Prize judges said it "belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th Century view of the male-female relationship". They also praised her autobiographical writing in Under My Skin and Walking In The Shade, where she recalled "not only her own life but the entire epoch: England in the last days of the empire."

But her writing has not been confined to personal experience. In the series of novels Canopus In Argos: Archives (vol 1-5, 1979-1984), she was credited with expanding the science fiction genre and she has written Memoirs Of A Survivor, The Good Terrorist, Briefing For A Descent Into Hell, The Summer Before The Dark and The Fifth Child.

Lessing is the oldest-ever winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and only the 11th female recipient in its 106-year history.

The prize comes with a £775,000 windfall and it is guaranteed to boost the sales of her work.

As she arrived at her north London home in a taxi, she said: "This has been going on for 30 years. I've won all the prizes in Europe, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush."

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