Actualidad literaria

La novelista británica Doris Lessing se mostró desanimada tras constatar el desgaste que implica haber ganado el galardón de la Academia sueca, según comenta durante una entrevista a la BBC. También señaló que ya se gastó casi todo el dinero que recibió por el premio y que la próxima novela será la última. "Paré, no tengo energía (para escribir). Por eso no dejo de decir a los que son más jóvenes que yo que no se imaginen que siempre serán jóvenes", se quejó la autora.

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"Todo lo que hago es conceder entrevistas y dejarme hacer fotos", declaró la novelista, de 88 años, en una parte de la entrevista que será emitida este lunes por la señal británica.

Interrogada sobre su creación literaria, Lessing fue categórica. "Paré, no tengo energía. Por eso no dejo de decir a los que son más jóvenes que yo que no se imaginen que siempre serán jóvenes", dijo.

Lessing se convirtió en 2007 en la escritora más anciana en recibir un Nobel de Literatura.

La octogenaria autora afirmó además que ha gastado casi la totalidad de los 1,5 millones de dólares que recibió por el la máxima distinción literaria. "Ese dinero fue para mis hijos, mis nietos y mi familia extendida. En dos años no quedará nada. Para colmo mi contador me dice que tengo que deshacerme de ese dinero. Tengo que darlo sino el recolector de impuestos se quedará con todo", comentó en la entrevista que reprodujo el Sunday Times.

El galardón recompensó su amplia y diversa obra marcada por la denuncia de la situación social en África y respecto de la causa feminista.

Nacida en en 1919 en el actual Irán, Doris May Taylor vivió durante los primeros años de su vida en la ex colonia británica de Rhodesia del Sur, actual Zimbawe. Esto marcó su obra literaria posterior.

Fue miembro del Partido Comunista y a menudo ha sido comparada con la francesa Simone de Beauvoir por sus ideas feministas. El cuaderno dorado (1962) es uno de sus libros más conocidos.

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Nobel prize proves ‘disaster’ for Doris Lessing

Publica The Times

Por Richard Brooks, Arts Editor

Doris Lessing, who welcomed her Nobel prize for literature last autumn as the completion of a “royal flush”, has reversed her opinion and now believes the award has been “a bloody disaster”.

“All I do now is give interviews and spend time being photographed,” the 88-year-old writer says in an interview to be broadcast tomorrow. She regrets that her life has been constantly disrupted since she won the prize last October.

Lessing adds that she has already spent much of the £775,000 she was awarded.

“It has gone to my children, my grandchildren and my extended family,” says Lessing. “It will all be gone in two years. Anyway, my accountant tells me I should get rid of it. Give it away otherwise the tax man will get it.”

The author’s comments about the prize contrast with her earlier surprised enthusiasm when she was told by a television crew she had won it as she stepped out of a cab at her north London home after a trip to the shops.

“Oh Christ,” she replied, continuing: “I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I’m delighted to win them all . . . it’s a royal flush.”

Lessing was too ill to travel to Stockholm to receive the prize and since it was awarded she has suffered a bad back and heart problems. “I’m now a crock. I have a very limited life and only go out reluctantly,” she says.

The award was eventually presented earlier this year at the Wallace Collection in central London.

Lessing’s breakthrough novel was The Golden Notebook in 1962, hailed as a pioneering work by the feminist movement. She has said, however, that it is not “a trumpet for women’s liberation”, but rather a book describing human breakdown.

Her other acclaimed books include The Grass Is Singing, The Good Terrorist and Memoirs of a Survivor, which was made into a film in 1981 starring Julie Christie and the late Sir Nigel Hawthorne.

The interview with Lessing on the arts programme Front Row on Radio 4 comes with the publication of her new book Alfred & Emily – the names of her father and mother.

Lessing talks about her parents and admits she had a bad relationship with her mother: “I disliked my mother and she disliked me,” she says. “I was chemically wrong for her and we were bound not to get on. It was a tragedy for her, but not for me.”

The novelist, born to British parents in what is now Iran, lived in Africa before moving to England after the second world war. She has had a turbulent private life including two husbands and, it was claimed in a book in 2006, an affair with the playwright John Osborne. She emphatically denied the claim, remembering Osborne as “very mixed-up . . . extremely generous in some ways”.

The author believes her new book, which is part fiction and part fact, will almost certainly be her last. “I have no time to write. I also don’t have the energy any more. This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me, ‘Don’t imagine you will have it for ever. Use it while you’ve got it’,” she says. “Because it will go. It’s sliding away like water down a plughole.”