Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing Dead at 94

Doris Lessing, the author of over 50 novels died at home earlier today. She was 94 years old.

The Toronto Star summarized beautifully:

Doris Lessing, the Nobel prize-winning, free-thinking, world-travelling and often-polarizing author of The Golden Notebook and dozens of other novels that reflected her own improbable journey across the former British empire, died Sunday. She was 94.

Her publisher, HarperCollins, said the author of more than 55 works of fiction, opera, nonfiction and poetry, died peacefully early Sunday. Her family requested privacy, and the exact cause of death was not immediately clear.

Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. She was the oldest person to have been awarded the prize, as well as the 11th woman. At the time she said, “I’m 88 years old and they can’t give the Nobel to someone who’s dead, so I think they were probably thinking they’d probably better give it to me now before I’ve popped off.”

The British author was best known for The Golden Notebook, which many consider to be one of the most important feminist novels ever written. The novel was published in Britain and the United States in 1962, though it was not published in Germany or France for another 14 years due to material that was thought to be too inflammatory.