A worthy winner

Most of the media seemed determined to turn Doris Lessing into a sweet old lady who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, as it were, in a fit of absence of mind. Almost all of them said, on no evidence at all, that she’d been “shopping” at the time of the announcement. She has never been one to waste anyone’s time, least of all her own, and was absolutely clear about this prize; she’d won every other literary prize by now, she said, so she might as well have this one.

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As indeed she might. When you start your literary career, nearly sixty years ago, by writing an absolutely technically flawless novel in the form of The Grass is Singing, there might seem to be few directions to go in.