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Doris Lessing
 
was born of British parents in Persia (now Iran) in 1919
and was taken to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)when she was five. She spent her childhood on a large
farm there and first came to England in 1949. She
 brought with her the manuscript of her first novel,
The
Grass
is Singing,
which was published in 1950 withoutstanding success in Britain, in America, and in ten
European countries. Since then her international repu-
tation not only as a novelist but as a non-fiction andshort story writer has flourished. For her collection
of short novels,
Five,
she was honoured with the 1954
Somerset Maugham Award. She was awarded the
Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1981,
and the German Federal Republic Shakespeare Prize of 
1982. Among her other celebrated novels are
The
Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark,
Memoirs of a Survivor
and the five volume
Children of 
Violence
series. Her short stories have been collected in
a number of volumes, including
To Room Nineteen
and
 The Temptation of Jack Orkney;
while her African
stories appear in
This Was the Old Chief's Country
and
 The Sun Between Their Feet. Shikasta,
the first in a
series of five novels with the overall title of 
Canopus inArgos: Archives,
was published in 1979. Her novel
The
Good Terrorist
won the W. H. Smith Literary Award for 
1985, and the Mondello Prize in Italy that year.
The
Fifth Child
won the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Italy, anaward voted on by students in their final year at school.
 The Making of the Representative for Planet
8 was made
into an opera with Philip Glass, libretto by the author,
and premiered in Houston. Her most recent works
include the novel,
Ben, in the World
(the sequel to
The
Fifth Child)
and two volumes of her autobiography,
Under My Skin,
and
Walking in the Shade.
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