Limited Edition, Numbered and Signed by the Author.

Lessing, Doris ~ On Not Winning The Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize Lecture 2007 : Signed By The Author

Limited edition : Oak Tree Fine Press, Fyfield : 2008

Tall thin 8vo., green cloth-backed paste paper boards, with repeat devices of goats and a woman standing with children printed in green; lettered in gilt to the backstrip; housed in a matching green cloth slipcase; textured cream endpapers; title woodcut vignette of the author; a fine copy. Limited edition, one of 176 copies, of which just 150 are hand numbered and signed by the author. The publication is dedicated to children living with HIV/AIDS. Containing the full speech given by Lessing on her acceptance of the prize at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on the 7th December 2007. On awarding the prize, Professor Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy singled out The Golden Notebook as a ‘pioneering work’, and described Lessing as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected civilisation to scrutiny”. Lessing was reportedly out shopping when the award was announced, and was typically irreverent in her response to the news. "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot," she said to the reporters gathered outside her home in north London. "It's a royal flush." (The Guardian). She was the oldest person ever to receive literature's most prestigious prize, aged 87, and the 11th woman to win in its 106-year history. Her speech, however, ends on a more poignant note. “It is that girl”, she writes, “and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us”. A fine copy.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Fine