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Ms Lessing was being presented with the Nobel Prize medal by Swedish Ambassador Staffan Carlsson amid the Old Master paintings of the Wallace Collection art gallery. -- PHOTO: AP
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LONDON - NOBEL literature laureate Doris Lessing, who missed last month's awards ceremony due to ill health, was due to receive her prize on Wednesday in London.
Ms Lessing was being presented with the Nobel Prize medal by Swedish Ambassador Staffan Carlsson amid the Old Master paintings of the Wallace Collection art gallery.
The 88-year-old writer suffers back problems and was not well enough to travel to Stockholm for the official Nobel prize-giving ceremony on Dec 10.
Born in Persia - now Iran - and raised in what is now Zimbabwe, Lessing drew on her experiences in colonial Africa for her debut novel, 'The Grass is Singing,' published in 1950. Her most influential book is probably 'The Golden Notebook,' published in 1962 and considered a feminist classic.
The author of more than 50 novels, volumes of short stories, memoirs and plays, Lessing was announced as the 2007 Nobel Literature laureate in October.
The Swedish Academy, which awards the 10 million kronor (S$2.13 million) prize, praised her 'scepticism, fire and visionary power.' Ms Lessing was both sceptical and fiery when told she had won by reporters waiting outside her London house.
'Oh Christ, I couldn't care less,' she said. 'This has been going on for 30 years.
'I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush.' Ms Lessing has long been known for her fierce and often contrary opinions.
In October, she told a Spanish newspaper that the Sept 11, 2001 attacks were 'neither as terrible nor as extraordinary' as many people think.
'Sept 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible,' she told El Pais.
Her Nobel acceptance speech - delivered in Stockholm last month by her publisher, Mr Nicholas Pearson - was titled 'On Not Winning the Nobel Prize.'
In it she implored society to remember the importance of stories and books, despite a host of threats - from poverty and poor government in Zimbabwe, to the Internet and consumer culture in the West.
'We have a treasure-house - a treasure - of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come on it,' she said. 'Suppose it did not exist.
How impoverished, how empty we would be.' -- AP
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