While the seven Harry Potter novels have enjoyed amazing success, it is doubtful that their author, J. K. Rowling, will ever be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Only one British woman has received such an honor, eighty-nine-year-old Doris Lessing. Born in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 to British parents, Lessing moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in white-ruled southern Africa when she was a child. She lived a comfortable yet sheltered life in the racially divided colonial society. In her early twenties, however, she met and began socializing with intellectuals and other émigrés from Hitler's Europe, ultimately developing a lifelong interest in leftist politics. In 1949, with a finished manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing, Lessing left Africa for Europe to pursue writing full-time.
Lessing's approach to writing has evolved through three separate periods, characterized by the themes expressed in her books. The first of these, politics, lasted from 1949 to 1956, and the semi-autobiographical Martha Quest is regarded as her best work from this time. The novel centers on a white woman in Africa who develops a political conscience and works to better the lives of the poor. The second, psychology, lasted from 1956 to 1969. Her best-known work from this period was 1962's The Golden Notebook, the story of a woman writer and the independence her career brought her. The book has been hailed as a classic feminist novel, but Lessing insists that many readers failed to grasp its theme of emotional healing. The third stage of Lessing's writing career, from 1969 onwards, emphasizes spirituality and has been influenced by her conversion to Sufism, a mystical form of Islam. She has chosen to explore the implications of this philosophy from within a genre that few serious British writers are willing to embrace. Shikatsa, published in 1979, analyzes human history from the perspective of creatures from another planet. Lessing admits that she enjoys the freedom to mix reality and fantasy that science fiction offers.
First nominated for the Nobel Prize in the 1960s, Lessing was passed over by the awarding committee many times before gaining the honor in late 2007. In an interview months earlier, Lessing had announced that the novel she was then working on would be her last, saying that it was simply time to stop. Whether or not she actually ceases writing when she finishes her current work, the significance of her contribution to English literature will endure. Lessing's name is not as recognizable to most readers as Rowling's, nor have her works sold as many copies, but Doris Lessing has finally received the highest validation for her writing.