FACTBOX: Who is Doris Lessing?

(Reuters) - British novelist Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature, the Swedish Academy said on Thursday.

Here are some facts about Doris Lessing:

* EARLY LIFE:

-- Born in what was Persia, now Iran, on October 22, 1919. Lessing was raised in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. At the age of seven she was sent to a convent boarding school but later moved to a girls' school in Salisbury, Rhodesia.

-- She went to Britain at the age of 30 with the manuscript of her first novel, "The Grass Is Singing", about the relationship of a white farmer's wife and her black servant. It was an immediate best-seller in Britain, Europe and America.

-- Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the 1950s and early 1960s, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa.

-- In 1956, in response to Lessing's outspokenness, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.

* POLITICAL COURAGE:

-- Lessing is now widely regarded as one of the most important post-war writers in English. Her novels, short stories and essays have focused on a wide range of 20th-century issues from the politics of race, to the politics of gender which led to her adoption by the feminist movement, to the role of the family and the individual in society, explored in her space fiction of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

-- In 1987's "The Wind Blows Away Our Words", Lessing attacked what she saw as the West's indifference to the war in Afghanistan. In it, she described a trip she made in 1986 to Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan.

* RECENT NOVELS:

-- In "The Good Terrorist" (1985), she returned to the political arena through the story of a group of political activists who set up a squat in London. The book was awarded the WH Smith Literary Award.

-- "The Fifth Child" (1988) was also concerned with alienation and the dangers inherent in a closed social group.

-- Most recently she has written, "The Grandmothers" (2003), a collection of four short novels centered on an unconventional extended family and "Time Bites" (2004), a selection of essays based on her life experiences. Her latest novel is "The Cleft"

(2007).

-- She was made a Companion of Honor in 1999.

Sources: Reuters/www.contemporarywriters.com, Swedish Academy