Lessing, who at 87 is the oldest person to win the Nobel Literature prize, could not be reached to be told of her award, the academy’s permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said. Lessing’s agent, Jonathan Clowes, said she was out shopping in London.

Lessing was born to British parents who were living in what is now Iran. The family later moved to Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe. She dropped out of school at age 13.

She made her debut with The Grass Is Singing in 1950. Her other works include the semiautobiographical Children Of Violence series, largely set in Africa.

Her breakthrough was the 1962 The Golden Notebook, the Swedish Academy said.
“The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that inform the 20th century view of the male-female relationship,” the academy said in its citation announcing the prize.

Other important novels of Lessing's include The Summer Before Dark in 1973 and The Fifth Child in 1988.
Lessing is the second British writer to win the prize in three years. In 2005, Harold Pinter received the award. Last year, the academy gave the prize to Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk.

“When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s,” she said in an interview last year. “What I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire — nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?”

Lessing’s family moved to a farm in southern Rhodesia in 1925, an experience she described in the first part of her autobiography Under My Skin that was released in 1944. Because of her criticism of the South African regime and its apartheid system, she was prohibited from entering the country between 1956 and 1995. Lessing, who was a member of the British Communist Party in the 1950s, had been active in campaigning against nuclear weapons.