Doris Lessing Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature

Doris Lessing is now the oldest recipient of the the award. It goes to show that this award is given for a body of work and not just for recent accolades, since I don't recall many recent books from her. It is kind of surprise that she beat out authors such as Philip Roth, Amos Oz, and Haruki Murakami. I can't help but speculate that her age played a factor here. She is just shy of her 88th birthday and since the prize cannot be award posthumously, the committee may be feeling to give it to her before she passes on. Again, I'm just speculating. NPR has a nice article on her on their site.

Actually, I was just thinking about Doris Lessing the other day because of her speculative fiction titles which, for the most part, are out of print. Congratulations to her! I think that this bodes well for another author whose body of work is more than worthy for the Nobel Prize, in my opinion: think Margaret Atwood!