Biography
Doris Lessing (1919–2013), born Doris May Tayler, was a British writer and one of the most influential novelists of the postwar period. She was born on 22 October 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia, now Iran, to British parents. In 1925, her family moved to Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where they settled on a farm. Lessing left school as a teenager and continued her education largely through independent reading. After working several jobs and beginning to write, she moved to London in 1949 with her youngest son. Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published in 1950 and drew on her experience of life in colonial Southern Africa.
Lessing joined the Communist Party in Britain and later broke with it. Her political commitments and changing views became part of a life spent questioning rigid ideologies. In 2007, she received the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in London on 17 November 2013, aged 94.
