Art, literature & culture

Birth of Doris Lessing

22 October 1919

Doris Lessing was born on 22 October 1919 in Kermanshah. A British writer, Lessing was born in Persia, now Iran, to British parents and grew up on a farm in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. She moved to London in 1949 with the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, which deals with racial tensions in colonial Africa. Her masterpiece, The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, explores a woman writer's fractured life and became a landmark of feminist literature. Her work also includes the Children of Violence series and science fiction novels. A critic of colonialism and apartheid, she was banned from Southern Africa for years. In 2007 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 88.

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