Lessing “passed away peacefully at her London home in the early hours of this morning,” her publisher HarperCollins said in an e-mailed release. Lessing lived in North London for the past two decades.
Born to English parents in present-day Iran, and raised in what is now Zimbabwe, Lessing witnessed the demise of the British Empire, race-based governments in Africa and the communist movement she briefly joined after World War II. Her novels and short stories challenged the notion of fixed truths and permanent institutions.
Her best-known work, the largely autobiographical 1962 novel “The Golden Notebook,” tells the story of an independent, modern woman in Africa who records her varied life experiences in four notebooks and tries, in a fifth, to weave them into a coherent picture of a complex life.
The Swedish Academy, in awarding Lessing the Nobel Prize, called her “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”
