Doris Lessing – The Hostess and the Alien
May 27, 2008
Intimate encounter with one of the twentieth century’s most challenging and influential novelists, Doris Lessing. 2007’s Nobel Prize winner for Literature, she is both ‘hostess’ and ‘alien’ – the hostess, who presents a public face to the world, and the private person who writes, dreams and ‘experiments with her life’.
Alan Yentob makes the tea in the kitchen of this unself-censored 88-year-old, whose ‘myth country’ is still the African bush where she was brought up. All her life she has been fighting her mother, about whom – as about everything – she is refreshingly frank. Feminism, communism, Sufism, science fiction – we hear her opinions and those of some she has influenced.
“Jill Nicholls crafted a compelling, even challenging, portrait of a completely original artist”
The Independent
“Armed with a cup of tea and nothing to prove, Doris Lessing
addressed her past with a vivid wit.”
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian
“captivating”
Time Out
” … a definite hit …”
Telegraph
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