Nobel Prize-winning British author Doris Lessing dies aged 94

Published November 17, 2013
British novelist Doris Lessing is seen smiling as she poses with her Nobel Prize for Literature at the Wallace Collection in London in this January 30, 2008 file photograph. -Reuters Photo
British novelist Doris Lessing is seen smiling as she poses with her Nobel Prize for Literature at the Wallace Collection in London in this January 30, 2008 file photograph. -Reuters Photo

LONDON: British author Doris Lessing, whose powerful feminist and anti-colonial writing won her the Nobel Literature Prize, died Sunday at the age of 94, her agent and publisher said.

The author's longtime agent and friend Jonathan Clowes said Lessing had died peacefully at her London home in the early hours of Sunday morning.

“She was a wonderful writer with a fascinating and original mind,” he said.

“It was a privilege to work for her and we shall miss her immensely.”

Best known for the 1962 novel “The Golden Notebook” which is today considered a landmark feminist work, Lessing became the oldest winner of the Nobel Literature Prize in 2007.

She penned more than 50 novels, ranging from radical political critiques to science fiction.

Nicholas Pearson, her editor at HarperCollins, said her life and career had been “a great gift to world literature”.

“She wrote across a variety of genres and made an enormous cultural impact,” he said in a statement.

“Even in very old age she was always intellectually restless, reinventing herself, curious about the changing world around us, always completely inspirational. We'll miss her hugely.”

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