Where to start with Doris Lessing: a guide to her best works
Doris Lessing wrote over 70 works, including three novels that were nominated for a Booker Prize. Discover where to start with her writing and fiction
Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing is widely considered one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007.
A multi-award-winning and prolific author, Lessing wrote provocative, inventive and influential works, ranging from novels, short stories and science fiction to autobiography, drama, poetry, essays and operas.
Among her most celebrated novels are The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark and Memoirs of a Survivor. Lessing was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times: Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), The Sirian Experiments (1981) and The Good Terrorist (1985).
She was also shortlisted, for her entire body of work, for The Man Booker International Prize 2005 and 2007.
All nominated books
Radical ideology struggles against a bourgeois upbringing as a conscience rebels in Doris Lessing’s compelling revolutionary satire
An incoherent man is found wandering the streets of London, at the start of Doris Lessing’s brilliant and disturbing novel about madness and release.
In the third book of Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series, Earth continues to evolve under manipulation by advanced extra-terrestrial civilisations.
