“In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.”

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.