"British author Doris Lessing has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. The 87-year-old has been honoured with the 10m kronor (£763,000) award for her life's work over a 57-year career. Her best-known works include The Golden Notebook, Memoirs of a Survivor and The Summer Before the Dark. Lessing said she was 'very glad' about the honour - particularly as she was told 40 years ago that the Nobel hierarchy did not like her.She told BBC Radio 4: 'I've won it. I'm very pleased and now we're going to have a lot of speeches and flowers and it will be very nice.'
She recalled that, in the 1960s, 'they sent one of their minions especially to tell me they didn't like me at the Nobel Prize and I would never get it. So now they've decided they're going to give it to me. So why? I mean, why do they like me any better now than they did then?'
The author, who turns 88 on 22 October, said she thought she had become more respectable with age. '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,' she said.
Lessing is only the 11th woman to win the prize, considered by many to be the world's highest accolade for writers, since it started in 1901."
For Wikipedia's bio on Lessing, click here.