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The prolific novelist Doris Lessing (1919 - 2013) was born to British parents in Iran. As a young child, she moved with her family to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where they attempted to farm. She ended her formal education at age 13 and left home soon after, finding work as a nursemaid, then a telephone operator in the capital. Lessing married and had two children, but soon left her family, decamping to England to pursue her interests in radical politics and writing. “There is nothing more boring” she said, “than for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.” In London, the writer became a prominent member of the British Communist Party (though she left following the Soviet invasion of Hungary). This earned her much attention from the British intelligence services, as did her active opposition to apartheid and nuclear arms.

Lessing’s first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950), is set against the backdrop of the Rhodesia of her childhood. Like most of her earlier novels, it delves into racial and radical politics. The Golden Notebook (1962), and the five novels collectively called Children of Violence were more richly psychological. Later in life, Lessing explored “space fiction” (her phrase) in series of novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives. They are imbued with ideas from Sufism, of which Lessing had become an adherent. Lessing published more than 50 novels in her long life; she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, at the age of 88.