Nobel Prize a royal flush for Lessing
From 21st centuryBRITISH writer Doris Lessing won the Nobel Literature Prize last Thursday for her works that have covered feminism and politics, as well her youth in Africa.
Lessing, 87, is the 11th woman to have won the prize since it was first awarded in 1901. The Swedish Academy described her as a writer \"of the female experience who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny\".
Lessing was out shopping when the prize was announced and learned the news several hours later when she returned to her London home. She was met by a throng of journalists. As the news settled in, Lessing put down her groceries, sat on her doorstep and put her head in her hand. \"I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush,\" she said.
Her work has covered many topics, and over the years she has been mentioned as a possible Nobel laureate. But she was not seen as a frontrunner this year.
The Golden Notebook, her best-known work, established her as a feminist icon back in 1962. But she has consistently refused the label and her writing does not play a directly political role.
Nonetheless, the Nobel jury noted that \"the feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th century view of the male-female relationship.\"
Doris May Taylor was born in Khermanshah, in what is now Iran, on October 22, 1919. She spent her childhood on a farm in Southern Rhodesia, what is now Zimbabwe, where her British parents moved in 1925. 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 named Gottfried Lessing. But she divorced again in 1949, when she fled to Britain with her young son and the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing. A close examination of racial oppression and colonialism, it was published the following year to rapid success.
Her Children of Violence series of novels, published between 1952 and 1969, first established her credentials as both a writer and a feminist.
\"I wasn't an active feminist in the 1960s, never have been,\" she has since insisted. \"I never liked the movement because it's too ideologically based. All sorts of claims were made for me that simply weren't true.\"
As the years passed, she became an increasingly outspoken critic of Africa, particularly the corruption and embezzlement by governments. She was barred entry to South Africa in 1956, but was finally able to revisit in 1995, after the fall of apartheid.
In recent years Lessing has also written several works of science fiction. She is also probably one of the oldest people anywhere to have her own page on the popular website MySpace. On a recent visit the site announced, under the label \"Female - 87 years old\", that \"Doris Lessing has 136 friends.\"
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activist 激进分子
apartheid 种族隔离
breakdown 崩溃
embezzlement 贪污
feminism 女权运动
scrutiny 详细审查
skepticism 怀疑
Bonus points
a throng of: 一群
After the performance, the singer was surrounded by a throng of fans asking for her autograph. 演出后，歌星被一群歌迷们围住要签名。
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