DHAKA: British Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing has died aged 94.

Her best-known works include The Golden Notebook, Memoirs of a Survivor and The Summer Before the Dark.

She became the oldest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature when in 2007 she won the award for her life`s work aged 88.

Born in what is now Iran, she moved to Southern Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe - as a child before settling in England in 1949.

Her debut novel The Grass is Singing was published in 1950 and she made her breakthrough with The Golden Notebook in 1962.

On winning the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy described Lessing as an "epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".

After learning she had won the award, she said she was "very glad" but recalled that in the 1960s she had been told the Nobel Prize committee did not like her and she would never win one.

"So now they`ve decided they`re going to give it to me. So why? I mean, why do they like me any better now than they did then?" she said.

Source: BBC
BDST: 2118 HRS, NOV 17, 2013
SR/JCK