Congratulations...

Doris Lessing.

A fine choice.

Lessing is the second British writer to win the prize in three years. In 2005, Harold Pinter received the award. Last year, the academy gave the prize to Turkey's Orhan Pamuk.


A seasoned traveler of the world, Lessing has known many homes from Persia to Zimbabwe to South Africa and London.

"When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s," she told The Associated Press in an interview last year ago.

"What I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever.

"There was the British empire - nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?"