Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize-winning author, has died at 94

Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing died at her home in London on Sunday, her publisher announced. She was 94.

Lessing is best known for her 1962 novel “The Golden Notebook,� considered an essential feminist work of fiction. Moreover, it was stylistically bold, using constructed artifacts such as diaries and newspaper clippings to tell a fractured story.

The daughter of British expatriates, Lessing was born in 1919 in Iran (then Persia) and raised on a family farm in Zimbabwe (it was then Rhodesia). After two marriages and divorces, Lessing moved to England in 1949. A sometime communist and outspoken opponent of South Africa’s apartheid regime, she was forbidden to travel to the country for decades.

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Lessing’s writing moved between realism, often with books set in Africa, and science fiction, with a penchant for dystopias. Her significant works include “The Grass Is Singing,� “The Good Terrorist,� and the series “The Children of Violence� and “Canopus in Argos.�

When Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2007, she was 88, the eldest literature laureate ever. “Oh Christ,� she famously said upon learning the news.

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