British novelist, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature — the most restless and category-resisting major English-language novelist of her generation. Born in Persia, raised on a farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from age five, she left her second marriage and moved to London in 1949 with the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950) — a devastating short novel about a poor white woman, her Black servant, and the racial catastrophe of the settler colony. The Rhodesian material kept returning: the five-volume Children of Violence sequence (1952–69), following Martha Quest from colonial girlhood to apocalypse, is the autobiographical spine of the early work.
The Golden Notebook (1962) made her famous and, against her wishes, a feminist landmark. Its heroine Anna Wulf keeps four colored notebooks — black (her African past), red (her Communism), yellow (her fiction), blue (her diary) — and the novel is the record of the breakdown that makes writing a single book impossible and then, in the "golden notebook," possible again. The book became one of the founding texts of second-wave feminism, though Lessing herself — a former Communist who had broken with the Party in 1956, a woman skeptical of all movements on principle — disliked the label.
She moved on: into science fiction (the Canopus in Argos sequence, 1979–83), into Sufi mysticism under Idries Shah, into the late autobiographical writing (Under My Skin, 1994; Walking in the Shade, 1997), and into the strange fable The Fifth Child (1988). Her refusal to stay in any one mode cost her critical credit and is, finally, her signature.