The Browser: Lessing's Joined-Up Utopianism Makes Her a Natural to Join the Dynamite Authors' Brigade

Summary

---

HERE'S a little literary puzzle. What connects the following writers: Sigrid Undset, author of Kristin Lavransdatter; Henryk Sienkiewicz, author of Quo Vadis?; Halldr Laxness, author of The Atom Station and Anatole France, author of Penguin Island? Here's a clue: it also unites George Bernard Shaw and Dario Fo, Yasunari Kawabata and Naguib Mahfouz, Derek Walcott and Toni Morrison. They have all written "outstanding works of an idealistic tendency" - in other words, they have received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

This week their august company was augmented by the election of Doris Lessing (the 10th British Nobel Laureate, after Kipling, Galsworthy, Bertrand Russell, Churchill, T S Eliot, Elias Canetti on a technicality, Golding, Naipaul and Pinter - we're still waiting for the first Scot). So congratulations to her. But what does winning the Nobel mean, exactly?

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

The Browser: Lessing's Joined-Up Utopianism Makes Her a Natural to Join the Dynamite Authors' Brigade

It certainly doesn't guarantee immortality. Who nowadays reads Count Maeterlinck or Sully Prudhomme, the first ...

See the full content of this document

---