Literature festivals and the aggressive marketing of celebrity authors have created a damaging climate for new writing, Doris Lessing, the Nobel laureate novelist, believes.

In her first public appearance since winning the £750,000 prize last October, Lessing said that she felt “desperately sorry” for young authors.

Lessing, 88, told an audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London that in the 1950s her publisher apologised for suggesting that she do publicity work. “Now what happens is that if you are a girl who’s good-looking and has written even a passable book you can be earning enormous sums of money very quickly and are then sent on a promotional tour.

“I’ve met girls who’ve said that this was the worst thing that could have happened to them. There are people who can’t write a second book because they are always on the telephone or having to do some TV thing. I feel desperately sorry for them.”

Lessing, the oldest winner in the history of the Nobel prize, looked frail and had to be helped to her seat by her interviewer for the night, Hermione Lee, the biographer.

Training her gaze on the modern literary scene she said: “The writer has become more and more a personality. Literary festivals (for example) are enormously enjoyable but when you go into one it’s got nothing to do with your writing.

“What’s happening is very bad for some types of new writers.” Publishers’ marketing demands have crowded out the vital “empty space” which writers need to surround themselves with, she said. “We all know that writing comes out of a man or a woman sitting alone in a room with the telephone off the hook, a cup of coffee and in the good old days, a cigarette.”

The remarks expand on thoughts expressed in Lessing’s Nobel lecture on December 7, which was recorded and played to the Swedish Academy hall in Stockholm because of her ill health.

In her lecture she spoke of how if the writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories “may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they ask each other is always to do with this space, this other time. ‘Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?’”

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