AP Features, November 28th, 2007
British writer Doris Lessing will not be able to travel to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in literature on Dec. 10 due to back problems, the Nobel Foundation said Wednesday.
"Unfortunately her medical advisers have said she must not travel," the foundation said in a brief statement.
The 10 million kronor (US$1.5 million; euro1.1 million) prize will be presented to the 88-year-old author in London instead, it said.
The announcement said Lessing — the oldest ever Nobel literature winner — "had been ill for some time" without giving details. But foundation spokeswoman Annika Pontikis told The Associated Press that Lessing canceled the trip to Sweden because of her back.
"She has back problems. I don't have any further information on it, but she can't travel because of it," Pontikis said.
In London, Lessing's representative Olivia Guest confirmed that the cancellation had "to do with her back."
The Swedish Academy announced in October that Lessing had won the prestigious award, citing her "skepticism, fire and visionary power" in novels, short stories, memoirs and plays that reflected her own unexpected journeys across time, space and ideology.
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 Nobel 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, Briton Harold Pinter, stayed home because of poor health. In 2004, Austria's Elfriede Jelinek declined the invitation to Stockholm, 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.
