“I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains”

British novelist

Doris Lessing was a British novelist, born in Iran and later associated with Southern Rhodesia and England. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 and is known for fiction shaped by displacement, political questionings, and changing personal and social worlds. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing, the five-volume Children of Violence sequence, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist, and the five books of Canopus in Argos: Archives. Her work often engages with society, ideology, and the pressures placed on individual lives.