In a little over a week, Doris Lessing will celebrate her 88th birthday – the Nobel Prize for literature seems a fine and fitting gift. She is not short of reward or glory: three times shortlisted for the Booker prize, she was made a Companion of Honour just before the turn of the millennium – she refused to be made a Dame of the British Empire on the grounds that said Empire no longer existed. Such a refusal encapsulates the mix of passion, politics and prose (though she’s also written plays and poems) which has made her one of Britain’s most treasured writers.

Her first novel, The Grass is Singing, published in 1949 marked her arrival on these shores, in literary in physical terms – it was published in London by Michael Joseph following her departure from then-Rhodesia. It was the beginning of her preoccupation with the roles of blacks and whites in Africa, where she had grown up – and her continuing interest in who the outsiders are in any society. She never flinched from depicting uncomfortable truths in her fiction; in 1956 she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.

Martha Quest, published in 1952, marked the beginning of a sequence of five novels which Lessing christened her “Children of Violence” series; like Lessing, Martha Quest is a girl growing up on an impoverished African farm and defining herself as a rebel. The final novel in the sequence, The Four-Gated City, brought Martha from Africa to London, and showed her readers the future – to this day her taste for alternative worlds has not waned. It is peculiar, perhaps, that “science fiction” is perceived as “male” genre when so many of its serious and gifted practioners – Lessing, Ursula K. LeGuin, Margaret Atwood – have been women.

The Four-Gated City came seven years after what many regard as her most significant novel, The Golden Notebook (1962). Anna Wulf’s tale is stylistically complex as her personality breaks down and reforms; in the second volume of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade, Lessing said that her purpose in writing The Golden Notebook was to demonstrate “that to divide off and compartmentalize living was dangerous and led to nothing but trouble”. Anna is a character who tries to live with in a completely free way – as an early critic noted, with the freedom of a man, a notion that perhaps reveals why Lessing’s relationship with the feminist movement has often been a vexed one. It is a seminal book, and its themes and concerns are no less significant nearly fifty years after it was first published.

In 1979 she began her Canopus in Argos series, science-fiction which then saw her collaborate with Philip Glass on an opera, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. Recent books, such as Mara and Dann and her latest novel, The Cleft, have kept to alternative worlds – though The Cleft received distinctly mixed reviews. For those who think she might be far too serious for their tastes, there’s always her passion for cats: her vignettes of feline life, Particularly Cats, were revised and reissued in 1991. It’s to be hoped that a current companion will be purring with contentment at her win.

Read:

The Grass is Singing (1949) – her first novel, in which her heroine, Mary, falls in love a black houseboy to devastating results

Martha Quest (1952) – the opening of the autobiographical Children of Violence sequence

The Golden Notebook (1962) – Anna Wulf’s bid to live a life of complete freedom

The Good Terrorist (1985) – private and political life in the militant left wing

Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997) – two volumes of autobiography, that take the author to 1949 and 1962 respectively. She has said there will not be a third volume, in order to protect those still living.

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