AP Features, November 28th, 2007
Doris Lessing is unable to travel to Stockholm to receive her Nobel Prize in literature on Dec. 10 due to back problems, the Nobel Foundation said Wednesday.
Instead, the $1.5 million prize will be presented to the 87-year-old British writer in London, it said.
"Unfortunately her medical advisers have said she must not travel," the foundation said.
Foundation spokeswoman Annika Pontikis told The Associated Press that Lessing canceled the trip because of back problems.
In London, Lessing's representative, Olivia Guest, confirmed the cancellation had "to do with her back."
Lessing was awarded the prize for her "skepticism, fire and visionary power" in novels, short stories, memoirs and plays that reflected her own unexpected journeys across time, space and ideology, the Swedish Academy said.
She had been invited to collect the award at the ceremony in Stockholm along with the Nobel winners in chemistry, physics, medicine and economics on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of prize founder Alfred Nobel 1896.
The Nobel Peace Prize is presented in Oslo, Norway, on the same date.
Literature prize winners traditionally give a lecture in Stockholm before accepting the award. Lessing's lecture would be prerecorded and shown at the academy on Dec. 7, the foundation said.
Guest said she hoped Lessing would be able to record her lecture in London, but added that plans to do so "aren't set in stone."
Lessing is the third literature laureate in the past four years to miss the Nobel festivities.
The 2005 winner, Harold Pinter, stayed home in Britain because of poor health. In 2004, Austria's Elfriede Jelinek declined the invitation, saying she was "not in a mental shape to withstand such ceremonies."
Jean-Paul Sartre, in 1964, is the only winner to have turned down the literature award altogether.
