UK's Lessing says Nobel deals her "royal flush"

By Mike Collett-White

LONDON (Reuters) - British novelist Doris Lessing, who found out about her Nobel Prize for literature from a reporter waiting outside her home, said it gave her the "royal flush" of prizes for writing.

"I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one," she said as she stepped out of a taxi carrying groceries. "I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot...It's a royal flush."

Sitting on the step outside her front door, the telephone ringing constantly behind her, the feisty 87-year-old issued a stern anti-war message and also described how she had once been told by an official that she would never win the Nobel Prize.

"People who have never even heard of me will now go out and buy my books," she told about a dozen reporters and cameramen crammed into her tiny front garden. "It's a very nice thing. So now I'm going to earn some money."

She only learned about the award when asked for her reaction by a Reuters television crew. She later told the media:

"I took my son to the hospital and I've been on the Heath so I didn't know (about the prize) until there were photographers," she said, referring to London park Hampstead Heath.

"I thought you were photographing the street for some television serial or something like that."

"YOU WILL NEVER WIN"

Lessing revealed how she was once approached by an official connected with the Nobel Prize at a formal reception in Sweden who told her she would never win the award.

"I hope their manners have changed," she said, referring to the Nobel organizers.

"Can you imagine the scene? (With) my Swedish publisher at a very, very formal dinner ... an official, he said, 'I've come to tell you you will never win the Nobel Prize,' and I hadn't asked for it, you know," she said.

"Can you imagine the cheek? What am I to say? 'Oh dear, I'm so sorry, why don't you like me?'"

Lessing said her next book, "Alfred and Emily", was an anti-war book dedicated to her parents, who were damaged by their experiences of World War One.

"I've written a book about my parents, who were very much damaged by World War One, as if there was no World War One. I've given them lives, ordinary, decent lives without war.

"In the second half is what actually happened to them in the war and actually it's pretty painful if you contrast the kind of lives they might have had with what actually happened to them."