Doris Lessing - Biography, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Filmography (Read)

Doris Lessing - biography, date of birth, place of birth, filmography, clips, Writer.

October 22, 1919, Kermanshah, Iran - November 17, 2013, London, England, UK - English science fiction writer.

Her father was an officer and her mother was a nurse.

In 1925, when Doris was 6 years old, her family moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), then an English colony.

Lessing herself described her years in the African wilderness as a "nightmare" that only occasionally had a little pleasure. According to the novelist, an unhappy childhood was one of the reasons that she began to write about the colonialist relationship with black Africans and the chasm between the two cultures. Her mother enthusiastically tried to introduce the traditions of the Edwardian way of life among the local population.

Lessing colorfully described her African impressions of her childhood in the short story No Witchcraft for Sale (1951).

Doris was educated at a Catholic school and then at a girls' school in the capital Salisbury (now Harare), from which she never graduated. She did not receive any further formal education. In her youth, she changed several professions, including working as a nurse, telephone operator, journalist.

Doris has been married twice. She first married in 1939 to Frank Charles Wisdom, to whom she gave birth to two children: daughter Jean (Jean Wisdom) and son John (John Wisdom). However, in 1943 she divorced her husband, leaving him with children. She married again in 1945. Doris's second husband was the German emigrant Gottfried Lessing. The Lessing had a son, Peter Lessing. The marriage ended in divorce in 1949. Doris took her son Peter and left Africa. She began a new stage in her life in London.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Doris Lessing joined the British Communist Party (although she left it after the USSR suppressed the Hungarian uprising in 1956) and became an activist of the anti-nuclear movement. She was denied the right to enter South Africa and Rhodesia for criticizing apartheid.

Doris Lessing's literary work can be roughly divided into three distinct periods: communist themes (from 1949 to 1956), when she wrote on acute social themes; psychological topics (1956-1969); another stage was Sufism, which was expressed in many of her science fiction works from the Canopus series.

Lessing's debut novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1949.

In 1962, The Golden Notebook was published, considered a classic in feminist literature.

Between 1979 and 1983 Lessing published The Canopus in Argos: Archives Series, in which she constructs a utopian future world, divided into six main zones, and populated by the archetypes of men and women ...

In 1985 Lessing published the satirical novel The Good Terrorist, about a group of London revolutionaries. The novel was well received by critics. In 1988 Doris Lessing's landmark book The Fifth Child was published. She is recognized as the highest achievement of the writer in the later period of her work.

Doris Lessing published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbor (1983) and If Old Age Could ... (1984).

In June 1995 Lessing was awarded her Ph.D. from Harvard University. In the same year she visited South Africa. In December 1999, Doris Lessing was included in the last list in the past millennium of persons awarded the Order of the Knights of Honor, which are awarded to scientists and artists for "special services to the nation."

In January 2000, Leonard McComb's portrait of Doris Lessing was officially unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In 2001 she received the David Cohen Award. Also received the Spanish Literary Prize of the Prince of Asturias, British Somerset Maugham Prize, the Italian Grinzane Cavour Prize, Alfred Toepfer's German Shakespeare Prize.

Doris Lessing received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 with the formulation "For the experience of women filled with skepticism, passion and visionary power."

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Author: Jane Watson