The man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

Novelist                          

Selected Works:

Novels:

The Grass is Singing - 1950
The Golden Notebook - 1962
Briefing for a Descent into Hell - 1971
The Summer Before the Dark - 1973
Memoirs of a Survivor - 1974
The Diary of a Good Neighbour - as Jane Somers, 1983
If the Old Could... - as Jane Somers, 1984
The Good Terrorist - 1985
The Fifth Child - 1988
Playing the Game - graphic novel, illustrated by Charlie Adlard, 1995
Love, Again - 1996
Mara and Dann - 1999
Ben, in the World - 2000 – sequel to The Fifth Child
The Sweetest Dream - 2001
The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog - 2005 – sequel to Mara and Dann
The Cleft - 2007
Alfred and Emily - 2008

The Children of Violence series:

Martha Quest - 1952
A Proper Marriage - 1954
A Ripple from the Storm - 1958
Landlocked - 1965
The Four-Gated City - 1969

The Canopus in Argos: Archives series:

Shikasta - 1979
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five - 1980
The Sirian Experiments - 1980
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 - 1982
The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire - 1983

Operas:

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 - music by Philip Glass, 1986
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five - music by Philip Glass, 1997

Drama:

Each His Own Wilderness - three plays, 1959
Play with a Tiger - 1962

Poetry:

Fourteen Poems - 1959
The Wolf People - INPOPA Anthology 2002 - poems by Lessing, Robert Twigger and T.H. Benson, 2002

Story collections:

Five Short Novels - 1953
The Habit of Loving - 1957
A Man and Two Women - 1963
African Stories - 1964
Winter in July - 1966
The Black Madonna - 1966
The Story of a Non-Marrying Man - 1972
This Was the Old Chief's Country: Collected African Stories, Vol. 1 - 1973
The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories, Vol. 2 - 1973
To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories, Vol. 1 - 1978
The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories, Vol. 2 - 1978
Through the Tunnel - 1990
London Observed: Stories and Sketches - 1992
The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches - 1992
Spies I Have Known - 1995
The Pit - 1996
The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels - 2003

Cat Tales:

Particularly Cats - stories and nonfiction, 1967
Particularly Cats and Rufus the Survivor - stories and nonfiction, 1993
The Old Age of El Magnifico - stories and nonfiction, 2000
On Cats - 2002 – omnibus edition containing the above three books

Non-fiction:

Going Home - memoir, 1957
In Pursuit of the English - 1960
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside - essays, 1987
The Wind Blows Away Our Words - 1987
African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe - memoir, 1992
A Small Personal Voice - essays, 1994
Conversations - interviews, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 1994
Putting the Questions Differently - interviews, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 1996
Time Bites - essays, 2004
On Not Winning the Nobel Prize - Nobel Lecture, 2007, published 2008

Autobiography:

Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 - 1994
Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 to 1962 - 1997.                          

Mother Emily Maude McVeagh
Father Alfred Tayler
First husband Frank Charles Wisdom, two children.
Second husband Gottfried Anton Nicolai Lessing, one child.                          

Nobel Prize for Literature - 2007
Dordis Lessing is the oldest winner of the literature prize at the time of the award and the third oldest Nobel Laureate in any category. Doris Lessing also stands as only the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy in its 106-year history.