Or I can hasBeeb link.

Last line of the BBC article: "She can also expect to see a rise in sales."

I'm embarrassed to realize how many of the laureates I've never even heard of, much less read their work.

Hooray for Doris Lessing. Maybe I need to read her books now.

"Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable ... fourth-rate science fiction," Bloom told The Associated Press.

I wonder what the professor considers to be first, second, and third rate science fiction to be?

I take exception to this. We have plenty of brie...
Actually, cold and dark winters is why we read writers like Doris Lessing. What else is there to do in a day that has four hours of daylight?

Oh, thank goodness. I was feeling so awful for your countrypeople.

Well done NPR. That's more than the BBC news bulletin I watched this (UK) lunchtime did. Nope, the SF word(s) never sullied their lips.

Ho hum.

Feminist? Check.
Postcolonial. Check?
Better award the prize soon? Check.

* Though there's a part of me that every year hopes that Kamau Brathwaite will get the nod.

I love her dry, albeit pleased, reaction to the fuss. "Now we're going to have a lot of speeches and flowers and it will be very nice."

And a big honking check, too.

(Teresa and I were, for several years, associate editors of the Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism, a massive reference work compiled under the rather cough distant cough "editorship" of H. Bloom. In Bloom's defense, I will say that he was entirely amenable to us including large amounts of material about various major SF writers.)

I was sorry, though, that neither NPR nor the BBC (KUOW plays BBC World Service from 1am to 5am) nor, apparently, the Nobel committee, gave mention of Lessing's subversive and sometimes almost juvenile sense of humor.

Lessing definitely admitted that what she was writing, betimes, was SF. So how can we advocate for (e.g.) Atwood, John Crowley, or a number of others?

But any bio info about her I can find doesn't mention Canada. It's very weird.

Neither Borges nor Calvino won a Nobel.

#28: I'm think I would know if Doris Lessing were Canadian. (My father, who was born in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe where she spent a considerable portion of her life, once dated her daughter before he emigrated to Canada.)

I read Shikasta and didn't care for it (subtle as a WB anvil) but I did like one of the other "Canopus" books very much.

Another possible source for the belief Lessing is Canadian, at least among people of my musical taste: She's mentioned in a verse of the Moxy Fruvous song "My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors" along with Margaret Atwood, W.P. Kinsella, and Robertson Davies, Canadians all.
Somehow, nobody makes this mistake about Mario Puzo.

My cat wins!

One of our cats — the small gray one, who’s sitting next to my keyboard as I write this — is named Doris Lessing. And she just won a Nobel.

She's mentioned in a verse of the Moxy Fruvous song "My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors" along with Margaret Atwood, W.P. Kinsella, and Robertson Davies, Canadians all.

believe it or not, you're not the only one to leap to that association. i wasn't gonna say nothing, but, yeah, there is officially at least one fruhead on making light.

This was welcome news. I've never read any of her SF books, but I'm a big fan of her contemporary novels. I like knowing, when there is an author I love, that there's whole unexplored body of work out there, just waiting for me.

I'm usually more interested in the various science prizes, but there's been a couple of nice lits recently, frex you can read or watch Harold Pinter's speech from 2005 onsite too.

Except that we know how others see us. We've known for ages. It's one of the great topics of fandom, it seems to me.

Me, personally, I only want to hear about exceptions to the general case. I love it when a Regular Writer writes an interesting piece of SF. I love it when a Regular Writer speaks up in favor of it. Not because I need their validation for the genre, but because I want to see them step up to the plate and take their cuts.

There are a lot of genuinely wonderful writers who do almost all their work in the genre. Among those I would list here would be Wolfe and Delany, but I think there are a lot of really crappy writers who populate the genre and anytime anybody who is Really Good, whether they are seen as a Regular Writer or not, steps up and takes a swing, I am very, very happy, even if the work doesn't entirely meet Our Standards.

I'm kind of sick of the topic "How Others See Us". I frankly don't give a crap.

It's actually embarrassingly easy to create a list of potential Literature Nobel winners who are collectively more impressive than the actual list of winners -- certainly restricting yourself just to people who were eligible (i.e. alive during the existence of the prize, I'm not cheating and listing Shakespeare here), and I think that in most if not all of the cases people who were actively considered. Such lists (I've seen many versions - example here) usually begin with Tolstoy, Ibsen and Mark Twain, move on through Joyce, Woolf and Proust (and Kafka, although I doubt he was considered), and then include all sorts of amazing writers like Nabokov and Borges and so on. And add your favorite SF writers to the list. (Who do you think should win the list among living SF writers?)

I've never read Doris Lessing, so this isn't any sort of reflection on her getting it; it's just an interestingly inconsistent prize.

It's about time. I wasn't much fond of her last book, but everybody has a bad novel in them.

Q.You've written many novels. Are there any you wish people would read more?

A. My science fiction books.

-------------
* cue rants on writers who won't admit they're writing SF, re: thread a few months back, etc.

She isn't, no. But compare her interview (@50) to what the NYTimes wrote about her Nobel win:

"She has dabbled in science fiction, and some of her later works bear the imprint of her interest in Sufi mysticism..."

Dabbled? They dabbled in research for that article.

Also, I strongly agree with the recommendation for The Good Terrorist. Deceptively placid on the surface for quite a while, and very dark underneath, with much to think about.

The Golden Notebook is a work of genius IMO, but like Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, or for that matter Dhalgren, it's not for everybody at all times. The last time I started rereading it I drifted away from it after a while, but I should have another go at it; I remember getting a lot out of it the first time through.

"Oh Christ, I couldn't care less."

The five novels in the Children of Violence series provide a refreshingly brutal perspective on the ill-informed enthusiasm motivating young revolutionaries. She travels into her future in the last volume, The Four-Gated City, but the series is generally mundane.

Her truth is even more fascinating than her fiction: I'd start with her autobiographies. She encircles the globe, explores divers religions and cultures, and fiercely defends the boundaries of a cranky smart woman:

Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949
and
Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography--1949-1962

What I particularly admire about Lessing is her ongoing willingness to admit her struggle with mental illness, and to share the insights it has brought her. She has had a remarkable ability to express her feelings, and the courage to print her thoughts, during during her descent into illness, her years of sometimes-florid psychosis, and her resumption of "normative" perception. Her science fiction work was informed by those experiences, as well as her view of social and societal interactions, and I've always found it very perceptive.

I'm thrilled about her award, and glad to know I'm not the only one who appreciates and enjoys her work.

Living sf writers who deserve a Nobel: definitely Gene Wolfe and John Crowley, probably Connie Willis, Tim Powers, Jack Vance and Michael Swanwick.