Doris Lessing, arguably Britain’s most influential living female author, received the world’s highest accolade for writers yesterday when she won the £639,000 Nobel Prize for Literature.

But the author was unaware of her triumph because she had “popped to the shops” as her name was being read out in Stockholm, according to a spokeswoman. She was told the news by journalists as she stepped out of a taxi outside her London home.

Lessing told them that she was totally surprised to win, saying: “I had forgotten about it, actually. My name has been on the shortlist for such a long time. This has been going on for 30 years. You can’t go on getting excited every year about this. There are limits to getting excited finally. I swear, I’m going upstairs to find some suitable sentences which I will be using from now on.”

She added: “I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I’m delighted to win them all. It’s a royal flush.”

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At 87, Lessing is following in the footsteps of Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw and, most recently, Harold Pinter, among other winners.

She has reached out to generations of readers with stories of her youth in colonial Africa, feminism and politics and is only the eleventh female writer to be selected for the Nobel.

The prize bears the name of the Swedish businessman and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896, decreeing in his will that the literature prize should go to “the person who shall have produced . . . the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”, a phrase that has continued to confound people ever since.

The 18 scholars and historians who make up the jury of the Swedish Academy chose Lessing as “that epicist of the female experience who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”.

Her selection was a surprise. The Italian Claudio Magris and the American Philip Roth had been tipped for the honour. Ladbrokes was celebrating as Lessing was its 50-1 outsider, attracting only a handful of bets.

Lessing, who lives in Hampstead, said later in a written statement: “Of all the prizes, the Nobel has the most prestige and glamour, and I couldn’t be more delighted.”

Born to British parents in what was then known as Persia (now Iran), she later lived on a farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) before settling in England. She became revered for themes that are largely concerned with people caught up in social and political upheavals.

Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose, who was also among those tipped to win, said: “She absolutely deserves it. I am very happy, though not as happy as she is.”

The prize will be presented in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death, along with the awards in medicine, chemistry, physics and economics.

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