![]() For those who haven’t experienced your writing, would you suggest a starting place for them? – And so, for those who … on past experience the award of the Nobel Prize will encourage millions to come to your writing who haven’t been there before. What I really meant was something else.” No, no, you write, and then they make what they want of it. You’re not then going to issue a sort of statement saying “Oh dear, that’s not right at all. There’s nothing you can do, really, if they get something that you’ve written absolutely wrong. The reader makes up his or her mind and the writer goes along with it. ![]() – So you leave it to the reader to decide what mission they find in your writing? No, because don’t forget that I was a communist once, and we had very, very nasty examples of the writer as engineer of the human soul. Do you think of yourself as having a mission when you write though, more than to tell stories? – Well over 50 books and a combination of styles of writing which defies description. To sum it all up must have been quite formidable, don’t you think? I mean they were faced with a quite astonishing number and range of writing. – Well I don’t really know what they had in mind when they wrote it, you see. Do you think that goes some way towards capturing the mission with which you write? – They describe you, in their citation, as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”. I’ve never seen anything written, or … I did talk to the chap who runs the Nobel Committee. You know, I was coming back at midday from taking my son to the hospital. – I wonder, have you had a chance to see the citation from the Swedish Academy? We have a tradition of recording very short interviews on the telephone with new Laureates for our archives, and I was hoping that we might speak for just a very few minutes? – This is Adam Smith from the Nobel Foundation’s website. – Good morning, may I speak to Doris Lessing please? ![]() The interviewer is Adam Smith, Editor-in-Chief of. Lessing, who wrote ‘The Grass Is Singing’, ‘Children of Violence’, ‘The Golden Notebook’ and ‘The Good Terrorist’ among other works reacted with a hilarious ‘Oh Christ’ as she was stopped by two journalists who informed her about the win.Telephone interview with Doris Lessing following the announcement of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, 11 October 2007. Now a video has gone viral of Lessing where she learns she has won the Nobel for literature but Lessing’s reaction is priceless, to say the least! Lessing, who passed away in 2013 was described by the Swedish Academy as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Gurnah is also the first African writer to win the award since Doris Lessing, British-Zimbabwean writer in 2007. The Nobel Prize for Literature was recently awarded to Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee." Gurnah received the prize not for just one particular book he wrote, but his contribution towards refugee literature that spanned across 10 novels he penned down.
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