Professor Wole Soyinka is one of the 120 individuals globally that have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The figure comprised 103 men and 17 women. Since its inauguration in 1901 up till last year (2023), the award has been held 116 times with the prize shared between two individuals on four occasions. The prize was not awarded on seven occasions. But as Soyinka clocks 90 years today, it is only 13 (including Soyinka) of the 120 Nobel Laureates in Literature that have ever lived beyond 90 years on earth. Of note, however, Soyinka is the only living nonagenarian Nobel Prize winner as all the 12 others have transited. Below is a brief profile of Nobel laureates in Literature who lived beyond 90:
Knut Hamsun
THE 1920 winner, Knut Hamsun, a Norwegian writer, died at 92. Born August 4, 1859, he died on February 19, 1952. Hamsun’s work spans more than 70 years and shows variation with regard to consciousness, subject, perspective and environment. He published more than 23 novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, works of non-fiction and some essays.
Knut Hamsun was born as Knud Pedersen in Lom in the Gudbrandsdal valley of Norway and was the fourth son of seven children of Tora Olsdatter and Peder Pedersen. When he was three, the family moved to Hamsund in Nordland. They were poor and an uncle had invited them to farm his land for him. At nine, Knut was separated from his family and lived with his uncle Hans Olsen, who needed help with the post office he ran. Olsen used to beat and starve his nephew, and Hamsun later stated that his chronic nervous difficulties were due to the way his uncle treated him.
In 1874, he finally escaped back to Lom and did all manner jobs for money, working as a store clerk, peddler, shoemaker’s apprentice, sheriff’s assistant, and an elementary-school teacher. At 17, he became a ropemaker’s apprentice; at about the same time he started to write. He asked businessman Erasmus Zahl to give him significant monetary support, and Zahl agreed. Hamsun later used Zahl as a model for the character Mack appearing in his novels Pan (1894), Dreamers (1904), Benoni (1908) and Rosa (1908). He spent several years in America, traveling and working at various jobs, and published his impressions under the title Fra det moderne Amerikas Aandsliv (1889).
Doing all the odd jobs paid off, as he published his first book: Den Gaadefulde: En Kjærlighedshistorie fra Nordland (The Enigmatic Man: A Love Story from Northern Norway, 1877). It was inspired from the experiences and struggles he endured from his jobs.
Hamsun, however, first received wide acclaim with his 1890 novel, Hunger (Sult). The semiautobiographical work described a young writer’s descent into near madness as a result of hunger and poverty in the Norwegian capital of Kristiania (modern name Oslo). To many, the novel presages the writings of Franz Kafka and other twentieth-century novelists with its internal monologue and bizarre logic.
Hamsun’s prose often contains rapturous depictions of the natural world, with intimate reflections on the Norwegian woodlands and coastline. For this reason, he has been linked with the spiritual movement known as pantheism. Prime among all of Hamsun’s works adapted to film is Hunger, a 1966 film starring Per Oscarsson. It is still considered one of the top film adaptations of any Hamsun works. Hamsun’s works have been the basis of 25 films and television mini-series adaptations, starting in 1916.
In 1898, Hamsun married Bergljot Göpfert (née Bech), who bore daughter Victoria, but the marriage ended in 1906. Hamsun then married Marie Andersen (1881-1969) in 1909 and she was his companion until the end of his life. They had four children: sons Tore and Arild and daughters Ellinor and Cecilia.
GEORGE Bernard Shaw
GEORGE Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist, was the 1925 Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, who died at 94, as he born on July 26, 1856 and died November 2, 1950. He was known at his insistence as Bernard Shaw, with his influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond.
He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation.
Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education. By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer.
Shaw was born at 3 Upper Synge Street in Portobello, a lower-middle-class part of Dublin. He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw (1814–1885) and Lucinda Elizabeth (Bessie) Shaw (née Gurly; 1830–1913). His elder siblings were Lucinda (Lucy) Frances (1853–1920) and Elinor Agnes (1855–1876). The Shaw family was of English descent and belonged to the dominant Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland.
Shaw’s major plays of the first decade of the twentieth century address individual social, political or ethical issues. Man and Superman (1902) stands apart from the others in both its subject and its treatment, giving Shaw’s interpretation of creative evolution in a combination of drama and associated printed text.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell
THE 1950 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Bertrand Arthur William Russell who died at 97. Russell, a British mathematician, logician, philosopher, and public intellectual, was born on May 18, 1872 and died on February 2, 1970. He had influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, and various areas of analytic philosophy.
He was one of the early 20th century’s prominent logicians and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore, and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British “revolt against idealism”. Together with his former teacher A. N. Whitehead, Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic.
Russell was born at Ravenscroft, a country house in Trellech, Monmouthshire into an influential and liberal family of the British aristocracy. His paternal grandfather, Lord John Russell, later 1st Earl Russell (1792–1878), had twice been prime minister in the 1840s and 1860s.
He had two siblings: brother Frank (seven years older), and sister Rachel (four years older). In June 1874, Russell’s mother died of diphtheria, followed shortly by Rachel’s death. In January 1876, his father died of bronchitis after a long period of depression.
Russell’s adolescence was lonely and he contemplated suicide. He remarked in his autobiography that his interests in “nature and books and (later) mathematics saved me from complete despondency. He was educated at home by a series of tutors. When Russell was eleven years old, his brother Frank introduced him to the work of Euclid, which he described in his autobiography as “one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love”.
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill
SIR Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, who died at 90, was the 1953 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was born on November 30, 1874 and died January 24, 1965. He was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who was twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War, and 1951 to 1955. Apart from 1922 to 1924, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies. Ideologically an adherent to economic liberalism and imperialism, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955. He was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924.
Of mixed English and American parentage, Churchill was born in Oxfordshire into the wealthy, aristocratic Spencer family. He joined the British Army in 1895 and saw action in British India, the Mahdist War and the Second Boer War, gaining fame as a war correspondent and writing books about his campaigns. Elected a Conservative MP in 1900, he defected to the Liberals in 1904. In H. H. Asquith’s Liberal government, Churchill was President of the Board of Trade and Home Secretary, championing prison reform and workers’ social security.
Churchill was born at his family’s ancestral home, Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. On his father’s side, he was a member of the aristocracy as a descendant of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, representing the Conservative Party, had been elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Woodstock in 1874. His mother, Jennie, was a daughter of Leonard Jerome, an American businessman.
Churchill began boarding at St George’s in Ascot, Berkshire, aged 7, was not academic and his behaviour was poor. In 1884, he transferred to Brunswick School in Hove, where his academic performance improved. In April 1888, aged 13, he passed the entrance exam for Harrow School. His father wanted him to prepare for a military career, so his last three years at Harrow were in the army form. After two unsuccessful attempts to gain admittance to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, he succeeded. He was accepted as a cadet in the cavalry, starting in September 1893. His father died in January 1895.
In February 1895, Churchill was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars regiment of the British Army, based at Aldershot. Eager to witness military action, he used his mother’s influence to get posted to a war zone. In the autumn, he and friend Reggie Barnes, went to observe the Cuban War of Independence and became involved in skirmishes after joining Spanish troops attempting to suppress independence fighters.
Halldór Kiljan Laxness
THE 1955 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Halldór Kiljan Laxness who died at 95. He was born on April 23, 1902 and died February 8, 1998. He was an Icelandic writer who and wrote novels, poetry, newspaper articles, essays, plays, travelogues and short stories. Writers who influenced Laxness include August Strindberg, Sigmund Freud, Knut Hamsun, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Bertolt Brecht, and Ernest Hemingway.
Halldór Guðjónsson was born in Reykjavík and when he was three, his family moved to the Laxnes farm in Mosfellssveit parish. He was brought up and enormously influenced by his grandmother, who “sang me ancient songs before I could talk, told me stories from heathen times and sang me cradle songs from the Catholic era”. He started to read books and write stories at an early age and attended the technical school in Reykjavík from 1915 to 1916. His earliest published writings appeared in 1916 in Morgunblaðið and in the children’s periodical Æskan. The same year, two letters-to-the-editor Halldór wrote also appeared in the North American-Icelandic children’s newspapers Sólskin, which was published in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Laxness then attended and in 1918 graduated from the Reykjavík Lyceum. By the time his first novel, Barn náttúrunnar (Child of Nature, 1919), was published he had already begun his travels on the European continent.
In 1922, Laxness met Málfríður Jónsdóttir (29 August 1896 – 7 November 2003), who gave birth to his first daughter, María, on 10 April 1923. In 1930, he married Ingibjörg Einarsdóttir (3 May 1908 – 22 January 1994), who gave birth to his son Einar on 9 August 1931. In 1940, they divorced.
In 1939, he met Auður Sveinsdóttir (30 June 1918 – 29 October 2012) at Laugavatn. Auður waited for Laxness and made sacrifices so he could focus on his work. They married in 1945 and moved into their home, Gljúfrasteinn, in Mosfellsbær later that year. Auður and Halldór had two daughters: Sigríður, born 26 May 1951, and Guðný, born 23 May 1954.
His daughter Guðný Halldórsdóttir is a filmmaker whose first work was the 1989 adaptation of Kristnihald undir jōkli (Under the Glacier). In 1999, her adaptation of Laxness’s story Úngfrúin góða og Húsið (The Honour of the House) was submitted for consideration for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Guðný’s son, Halldór Laxness Halldórsson, is a writer, actor, and poet. A grandchild, Auður Jónsdóttir, is an author and playwright. Gljúfrasteinn (Laxness’s house, grounds, and personal effects) is now a museum operated by the government of Iceland.
Czesław Miłosz
CZESLAW Miłosz, a Polish-American, was the 1980 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and he died at 93. He was born on June 30 1911 and died on August 14, 2004. He was a poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat and primarily wrote his poetry in Polish. He was regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who “voices man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts”.
Miłosz survived the German occupation of Warsaw during World War II and became a cultural attaché for the Polish government during the postwar period. When communist authorities threatened his safety, he defected to France and ultimately chose exile in the United States, where he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His poetry—particularly about his wartime experience—and his appraisal of Stalinism in a prose book, The Captive Mind, brought him renown as a leading émigré artist and intellectual.
Throughout his life and work, Miłosz tackled questions of morality, politics, history, and faith. As a translator, he introduced Western works to a Polish audience, and as a scholar and editor, he championed a greater awareness of Slavic literature in the West. Faith played a role in his work as he explored his Catholicism and personal experience.
Czesław Miłosz was born in the village of Šeteniai. He was the son of Aleksander Miłosz (1883–1959), a Polish civil engineer, and his wife, Weronika (née Kunat; 1887–1945). He was born into a prominent family. On his mother’s side, his grandfather was Zygmunt Kunat, a descendant of a Polish family that traced its lineage to the 13th century and owned an estate in Krasnogruda (in present-day Poland). Having studied agriculture in Warsaw, Zygmunt settled in Šeteniai after marrying Miłosz’s grandmother, Jozefa, a descendant of the noble Syruć family, which was of Lithuanian origin.
In 1949, Miłosz visited Poland for the first time since joining its diplomatic corps and was appalled by the conditions he saw, including an atmosphere of pervasive fear of the government. After returning to the U.S., he began to look for a way to leave his post, even soliciting advice from Albert Einstein, whom he met in the course of his duties.
As the Polish government, influenced by Joseph Stalin, became more oppressive, his superiors began to view Miłosz as a threat: he was outspoken in his reports to Warsaw and met with people not approved by his superiors. Consequently, his superiors called him “an individual who ideologically is totally alien”. Toward the end of 1950, when Janina was pregnant with their second child, Miłosz was recalled to Warsaw, where in December 1950 his passport was confiscated, ostensibly until it could be determined that he did not plan to defect. After intervention by Poland’s foreign minister, Zygmunt Modzelewski, Miłosz’s passport was returned. Realizing that he was in danger if he remained in Poland, Miłosz left for Paris in January 1951.
Upon arriving in Paris, Miłosz went into hiding, aided by the staff of the Polish émigré magazine Kultura. With his wife and son still in the United States, he applied to enter the U.S. and was denied. At the time, the U.S. was in the grip of McCarthyism, and influential Polish émigrés had convinced American officials that Miłosz was a communist. Unable to leave France, Miłosz was not present for the birth of his second son, John Peter, in Washington, D.C., in 1951.
Claude Simon
THE 1985 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is Claude Simon, who died at 91 years. He was born in Tananarive on the isle of Madagascar. His parents were French, and his father was a career officer who was killed in the First World War. He grew up with his mother and her family in Perpignan in the middle of the wine district of Roussillon. Among his ancestors was a general from the time of the French Revolution.
After secondary school at Collège Stanislas in Paris and brief sojourns at Oxford and Cambridge, he took courses in painting at the André Lhote Academy. He then travelled extensively through Spain, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and Greece. This experience, as well as those from the Second World War shows up in his literary work. At the beginning of the war, Claude Simon took part in the battle of the Meuse (1940) and was taken prisoner. He managed to escape and joined the resistance movement. At the same time, he completed his first novel, Le Tricheur (“The Cheat”, published in 1946), which he had started to write before the war.
Much of Claude Simon’s writing is autobiographical, dealing with personal experiences from World War II and the Spanish Civil War, and his family history. His early novels are largely traditional in form, but with Le vent (1957) and L’Herbe (1958) he developed a style associated with the Nouveau roman. La Route de Flandres (1960), which tells about wartime experiences, earned him the L’Express prize and international recognition. In Triptyque (1973) three different stories are mixed together without paragraph breaks. The novels Histoire (1967), Les Géorgiques (1981) and L’Acacia (1989) are largely about Simon’s family history.
Naguib Mahfouz Abdelaziz Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Basha
IN 1988, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Naguib Mahfouz Abdelaziz Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Basha, who died at 94. He was born on December 11, 1911 and died August 30, 2006. He was an Egyptian writer regarded as one of the first contemporary writers in Arabic literature, along with Taha Hussein, to explore themes of existentialism. He is the only Egyptian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He published 35 novels, over 350 short stories, 26 screenplays, hundreds of op-ed columns for Egyptian newspapers, and seven plays over a 70-year career, from the 1930s until 2004. All of his novels take place in Egypt, and always mentions the lane, which equals the world. His most famous works include The Cairo Trilogy and Children of Gebelawi. Many of Mahfouz’s works have been made into Egyptian and foreign films; no Arab writer exceeds Mahfouz in number of works that have been adapted for cinema and television. While Mahfouz’s literature is classified as realist literature, existential themes appear in it.
Naguib Mahfouz’s literary career is intertwined with the history of the modern novel in Egypt and the Arab world. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Arabic novel took its first steps in a society and culture that discovered this literary genre through the translation of European novels from the nineteenth century. However, for Naguib Mahfouz, a society as strong and ancient as Egyptian society, having preserved ancient traditions while modernizing, could absorb and incorporate, without fear, some aspects of Western culture.
Mahfouz was born in a lower middle-class Muslim Egyptian family in Old Cairo. The first part of his compound given name was chosen in appreciation of the well-known obstetrician, Naguib Pasha Mahfouz, who oversaw his difficult birth. Mahfouz was the seventh and the youngest child, with four brothers and two sisters, all of them much older than him.
Mahfouz published 34 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of screenplays, and five plays over a 70-year career. Possibly his most famous work, The Cairo Trilogy, depicts the lives of three generations of different families in Cairo from World War I until after the 1952 military coup that overthrew King Farouk. He was a board member of the publisher Dar el-Ma’aref. Many of his novels were serialized in Al-Ahram, and his writings also appeared in his weekly column, “Point of View”. Before the Nobel Prize only a few of his novels had appeared in the West.
Mahfouz remained a bachelor until age 43 because he believed that, with its numerous restrictions and limitations, marriage would hamper his literary future. “I was afraid of marriage . . . especially when I saw how busy my brothers and sisters were with social events because of it. This one went to visit people, that one invited people. I had the impression that married life would take up all my time. I saw myself drowning in visits and parties. No freedom.”
However, in 1954, he quietly married a Coptic Orthodox woman from Alexandria, Atiyyatallah Ibrahim, with whom he had two daughters, Fatima and Umm Kalthum. The couple initially lived on a houseboat in the Agouza section of Cairo on the west bank of the Nile, then moved to an apartment along the river in the same area. Mahfouz avoided public exposure, especially inquiries into his private life, which might have become, as he put it, “a silly topic in journals and radio programs.”
Nadine Gordimer
THE winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize for literature was Nadine Gordimer, who died at 90. He was November 20, 1923 and died July 13, 2014. He was a South African writer and political activist. Gordimer’s writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger’s Daughter were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organisation was banned, and gave Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 defence speech at the trial which led to his conviction for life. She was also active in HIV/AIDS causes.
Gordimer was born near Springs, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. She was the second daughter of Isidore Gordimer, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant watchmaker from Žagarė in Lithuania (then occupied by the Russian Empire), and Hannah “Nan” (née Myers) Gordimer, who was from London. Her mother was from an assimilated family of Jewish origins; Gordimer was raised in a secular household.
Gordimer’s early interest in racial and economic inequality in South Africa was shaped in part by her parents. Her father’s experience as a refugee from Tsarist Russia helped form Gordimer’s political identity, but he was neither an activist nor particularly sympathetic toward the experiences of black people under apartheid.
Gordimer was educated at a Catholic convent school, but was largely home-bound as a child because her mother, for “strange reasons of her own”, did not put her into school (apparently, she feared that Gordimer had a weak heart). Home-bound and often isolated, she began writing at an early age, and published her first stories in 1937 at the age of 13. Her first published work was a short story for children, “The Quest for Seen Gold”, which appeared in the Children’s Sunday Express in 1937; “Come Again Tomorrow”, another children’s story, appeared in Forum around the same time. At the age of 16, she had her first adult fiction published.
Gordimer had a daughter, Oriane (born 1950), by her first marriage in 1949 to Gerald Gavron, a local dentist, from whom she was divorced within three years. In 1954, she married Reinhold Cassirer, a highly respected art dealer who established the South African Sotheby’s and later ran his own gallery; their “wonderful marriage” lasted until his death from emphysema in 2001. Their son, Hugo, was born in 1955, and is a filmmaker in New York, with whom Gordimer collaborated on at least two documentaries.
Dario Luigi Angelo Fo
AN Italian playwright, actor, theatre director, stage designer, songwriter, political campaigner, Dario Luigi Angelo Fo, was the winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature and he died at 90.
In his time, he was “arguably the most widely performed contemporary playwright in world theatre”. Much of his dramatic work depends on improvisation and comprises the recovery of “illegitimate” forms of theatre, such as those performed by giullari (medieval strolling players) and, more famously, the ancient Italian style of commedia dell’arte.
His plays have been translated into 30 languages and performed across the world, including in Argentina, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Yugoslavia. His work of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s is peppered with criticisms of assassinations, corruption, organised crime, racism, Roman Catholic theology, and war.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, he took to lampooning Forza Italia and its leader Silvio Berlusconi, while his targets of the 2010s included the banks amid the European sovereign-debt crisis. Also in the 2010s, he became the main ideologue of the Five Star Movement, the anti-establishment party led by Beppe Grillo, often referred to by its members as “the Master”.
An eldest child, Fo was born at Leggiuno, Sangiano, in Lombardy’s Province of Varese, near the eastern shore of Lake Maggiore. His younger brother, Fulvio would become a theatre administrator, their younger sister Bianca Fo Garambois, a writer. Their mother, Pina Rota Fo, from a peasant background, wrote a book of reminiscences of the area between the wars, Il paese delle rane (Land of Frogs, 1978). Their father, Felice, was a station master for the Italian state railway, and the family frequently moved along the Swiss border when Felice was transferred to new postings.
In 1942, Fo moved to Milan to study at the Academy Brera Academy. However, the Second World War intervened. At age 16, Fo was part of the last generation of soldiers drafted by the fascist army of Mussolini’s Repubblica Sociale Italiana. Years later, when questioned about his affiliation, Fo explained that he initially opted to adopt a low profile because his family was active in the anti-fascist Resistance. Fo secretly helped his father to smuggle refugees and Allied soldiers to Switzerland by disguising them as Lombard peasants.
Fo met Franca Rame, daughter of a theatrical family, when they were working in the revue Sette giorni a Milano. They became engaged, and married on 24 June 1954. They had a son, Jacopo (born 31 March 1955), who would also become a writer.
Doris May Lessing CH OMG
THE 2007 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is Doris May Lessing CH OMG, a British novelist, who died at 94. She was born October 22, 1919 and died November 17, 2013. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she remained until moving in 1949 to London, England. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–1969), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).
In awarding the Nobel prize, the Swedish Academy described her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”.
Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Kermanshah, Iran, to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayler (née McVeagh), both British subjects. Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital in London where he was recovering from his amputation. The couple moved to Iran, for Alfred to take a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia.
In 1925 the family moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to farm maize and other crops on about 1,000 acres (400 ha) of bush that Alfred bought. In the rough environment, his wife Emily aspired to lead an Edwardian lifestyle. It might have been possible had the family been wealthy; in reality, they were short of money and the farm delivered very little income.
As a girl, Doris was educated first at the Dominican Convent High School, a Roman Catholic convent all-girls school in the Southern Rhodesian capital of Salisbury (now Harare). Then followed a year at Girls High School in Salisbury. She left school at age 13 and was self-educated from then on. She left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid. She started reading material that her employer gave her on politics and sociology and began writing around this time.
In 1937, Doris moved to Salisbury to work as a telephone operator, and she soon married her first husband, civil servant Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children (John, 1940–1992, and Jean, born in 1941), before the marriage ended in 1943. Lessing left the family home in 1943, leaving the two children with their father.
At the age of fifteen, Lessing began to sell her stories to magazines. Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published in 1950. The work that gained her international attention, The Golden Notebook, was published in 1962. By the time of her death, she had published more than 50 novels, some under a pseudonym.
In 1982 Lessing wrote two novels under the literary pseudonym Jane Somers to show the difficulty new authors face in trying to get their work printed. The novels were rejected by Lessing’s UK publisher but later accepted by another English publisher, Michael Joseph, and in the US by Alfred A. Knopf. The Diary of a Good Neighbour was published in Britain and the US in 1983 and If the Old Could in both countries in 1984, both as written by Jane Somers. In 1984 both novels were republished in both countries (Viking Books publishing in the US), this time under one cover, with the title The Diaries of Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could, listing Doris Lessing as author.
Alice Ann Munro
THE winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature is Alice Ann Munro, a Canadian short story writer, who died at 92. Her work tends to move forward and backward in time, with integrated short fiction cycles. Munro’s fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in a simple prose style.
Munro received the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 for her body of work. She was also a three-time winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and received the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s 1996 Marian Engel Award and the 2004 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for Runaway. She mostly stopped writing around 2013 and died at her home in 2024.
In July 2024, Munro’s daughter Andrea Robin Skinner published an essay in The Toronto Star in which she wrote that Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, sexually abused her in 1976 when she was nine years old, and that Munro stayed with him after Skinner told her about the abuse in 1992.
Munro was born Alice Ann Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario. Her father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, was a fox and mink farmer, and later turned to turkey farming. Her mother, Anne Clarke Laidlaw (née Chamney), was a schoolteacher. She was of Irish and Scottish descent; her father was a descendant of Scottish poet James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd.
Munro began writing as a teenager, publishing her first story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow”, in 1950 while studying English and journalism at the University of Western Ontario on a two-year scholarship. During this period she worked as a waitress, a tobacco picker, and a library clerk. In 1951, she left the university, where she had been majoring in English since 1949, to marry fellow student James Munro. They moved to Dundarave, West Vancouver, for James’ job in a department store. In 1963, the couple moved to Victoria, where they opened Munro’s Books, which still operates.
She had three children with James Munro (one died shortly after birth), and when the children were still young she would attempt to write whenever she could; her husband encouraged her by sending her into the book shop while he looked after the children and cooked. In 1961, after she had had a few stories published in small magazines, the Vancouver Sun ran a brief article on her, titled “Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories”, and called her the “least praised good writer”. She found it difficult, even with her husband’s help, to find the time among “the pile up of unavoidable household jobs” to write, and found it easier to concentrate on short stories, rather than the novels her publisher wanted her to write.
Munro’s highly acclaimed first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General’s Award, then Canada’s highest literary prize. That success was followed by Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a collection of interlinked stories. In 1978, Munro’s collection of interlinked stories Who Do You Think You Are? was published. This book earned Munro a second Governor General’s Literary Award and was short-listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1980 under its international title, The Beggar Maid.
From 1979 to 1982, Munro toured Australia, China and Scandinavia for public appearances and readings. In 1980, she held the position of writer in residence at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Queensland.
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