Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing dies; wrote 'The Golden Notebook'   CNN - November 17, 2013
Author Doris Lessing, who won a Nobel Prize for her life of literature, died Sunday at age 94, her publisher, Harper Collins, said. Lessing began writing at 7, which she said was not the result of inspiration, but her innate capacity. Lessing was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 2007 at the age of 88. The Swedish academy called her "the epicist of the female experience" who had "subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

Lessing, who dropped out of a school in the Rhodesian capital, Salisbury, when she was just 13, developed her writing skills by reading the works of Dickens, Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence and Dostoevsky. "I educated myself by reading," she said. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Lessing spoke of the desperate struggle for knowledge of people in some developing countries.