Doris Lessing born Doris May Tayler in Kermanshah, in Iran or Persia on October 22, 1919) is a British writer. Awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, Lessing 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, she is the oldest person to have received this prize, the oldest prior recipient being Theodor Mommsen, who was 1985.
*"The Golden Notebook with its meticulously crafted construction is about patterns - patterns in art and patterns in society. Freedom, the freedom to break these patterns, is Lessing's goal - for her characters, for her work, and for herself. Lessing also experimented with science fiction and fantasy: from 1979 to 1983 she wrote four novels, the "Canopus in Argos: Archives" series, which involve a struggle between good and evil set forth amidst galactic empires over thirty thousand years. One of them, The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight (1982), was the basis for a 1988 opera by the composer Philip Glass. In a perhaps whimsical attempt to examine how people would react to her writing if it was not done under the name of a famous author, Lessing wrote The Diary of Good Neighbor and If the Old Could … under the pseudonym "Jane Somers." The books sold poorly and were largely unreviewed until the real identify of the author became known."
