British writer Doris Lessing on Thursday won the Nobel Literature Prize for five decades of epic novels that have covered feminism, politics as well her youth in Africa.Lessing, who will be 88 next week, is only the 11th woman to have won the prize since it started in 1901.The Swedish Academy described Lessing as "that epicist of the female experience who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."Lessing has covered a multitude of topics.Although "The Golden Notebook", her best-known work, established her as a feminist icon back in 1962, she has consistently refused the label and says her writing does not play a directly political role.Born Doris May Taylor in Khermanshah, in what is now Iran, on October 22, 1919, Lessing spent her formative years on a farm in Southern Rhodesia, what is now Zimbabwe, where her British parents moved in 1927.It was, she later reflected, a "hellishly lonely" upbringing.Unsurprisingly, she could not wait to escape and in 1939 married Frank Wisdom, by whom she had two children before their divorce in 1943.She then married a German political activist called Gottfried Lessing, but divorced again in 1949, when she fled to Britain with her young son and the manuscript of her first novel, "The Grass Is Singing."
