Imagine - Summer 2008 - Doris Lessing: the Hostess and the Alien

Arts and culture programme. Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, is both 'hostess' and 'alien' - the hostess, who presents a public face to the world, and the private person who writes, dreams and 'experiments with her life'. Alan Yentob meets the feisty 88-year-old whose 'myth country' is still the African bush where she was brought up. All her life she's been fighting her mother - a relationship she explores in her latest book.