I was talking with a colleague about this and we decided that Lessing was the writer everyone knows but noone reads.

My understanding is she belongs to a long line of polemicists going back, in prose, to Defoe, Voltaire and Swift (and Thomas More?).

Her preferred mode (sci-fi) also reminds me of the gothic mode employed to such good effect by British writers toward the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.

They exploited this genre (invented in 1764 by Horace Walpole, son of the 'first' PM) to make points about contemporary society.

I think I've only read one small novella by her but have a few novels around the house that I must get to at some point.

I'm rather amazed that no-one took me up on my statement that Lessing is the second sf writer to be honoured with the Nobel Prize. The question this raised is: who was the first?

The only other bit of Nobel Prize trivia I know is the answer to the following: who is the only Literature Nobel Prize winner to have an entry in Wisden (the cricket bible)?

Awarding the prize to Lessing simply indicates how awful even this prize is. A pox on all lit prizes!

The announcement has been generally well received. It actually came as a bit of shock to a lot of readers who felt her time was well past.

If nothing else, these Literature prizes at least bring authors out into the mainstream media. I'd rather that than the long run of literary scandals that we've seen over the past decade.

Lessing has a huge following among women readers, not surprisingly as many of her concerns are women-specific, and was an iconic writer for second-wave feminists. I have never thought of her as 'primarily' an sf writer -- more of that as one genre among many. But then I don't think of it as in any way a hard-edged genre.

Perry, as for the other -- it's not LeGuin, is it? (Ought to be!)

Well, Lessing was Guest of Honor at the 1987 World Science Fiction convention in Brighton, UK. Hence my labelling.

As much as I would like to see LeGuin win it I doubt she ever will. I think Ballard might have a better chance. But the other one I'm really thinking of is William Golding who wrote a number of early sf stories. You could put a case for Lord of the Flies being an sf novel as it is based in a time after a nuclear holocaust. Don't forget that this was written in 1954.

Giving the prize to Lessing instead of Murakami (for example) is like giving it to Anne Radcliffe instead of Austen. This is the worst possible kind of ideological posturing.

Murakami will probably get it all in good time. A few people I know have said Lessing was "due" for it anything up to 20 years ago. The committee only gives the Prize to living writers and Lessing is now 88. Murakami is not yet 60.

With 4 of the past 7 winners being writers in English I think the committee will be looking to other literary traditions next year.