Last night Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Read her Nobel lecture online, it was delivered on Friday 7 December at the Swedish Academy by Nicholas Pearson, Doris Lessing’s publisher in the UK. In her speech she points to the importance of books and reading for the creation of literature and she also takes a swipe at the banality of the Internet compared with the depth of literature. But the part I enjoyed the best came towards the end…
The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise … but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative.