At the start of The Golden Notebook, central character Anna Wulf says: "As far as I can see everything is cracking up." Doris Lessing explains how a line emerging from a traumatic disillusionment with communism half-a-century ago would be redundant today –even though the cracks Anna foresaw have grown and deepened.
In interviews with the Guardian down the years, she also discusses why women have a better relationship than men with the universe, her astonishment that the language of her fiction continued to upset people, and why it is nonsense to say that the novel is dying.
Plus we listen in to that Nobel moment.