Lessing calls Nobel Prize a 'bloody disaster'
Last Updated: Sunday, May 11, 2008 | 11:15 AM ET
CBC News
Doris Lessing, looking pleased with her prize, holds up the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature medal after receiving it Jan. 30 in London. Lessing says she's too tired to write novels now.
(Matt Dunham/Associated Press)Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing says all the attention she has received since winning the prestigious award could mean she'll never write another full-length novel.
The award has been a "bloody disaster" for her as a writer, she told the BBC.
In an interview with BBC Radio, Lessing, 88, said she has been hounded by the media since capturing the prestigious prize last October and that has made writing a novel almost impossible.
"All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed," she told the program Front Row. "I don't have any energy anymore."
The author now says she might give up on writing novels altogether. Her latest book is a partly fictional memoir, Alfred and Emily.
"This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me, don't imagine you'll have it forever. Use it while you've got it because it'll go. It's sliding away like water down a plughole."
Lessing — whose best-known works include The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist — is the 11th woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature in its 106-year history.
At the time she said the win was "astonishing and amazing."
The Swedish Ambassador to London, Staffan Carlsson, presented the award to her in the U.K. in January after ill health kept her from travelling to Stockholm to accept the prize.
The Nobel Prize, worth $1.5 million US, bears the name of dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel and was first awarded in 1901 in accordance with Nobel's will.
Lessing, who was born in Iran, grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) before settling in England in 1949.
Her debut novel The Grass is Singing was published the following year. She has written more than 50 novels, plays, memoirs and collections of short stories.
