Doris Lessing

Among today's literary young guns, there is a certain blank-eyed uselessness - a pre-packaged functionality of both prose and person. It is no doubt a blinkered opinion to dismiss all the Zadie Smiths and Nick Hornbys of this world in one sweeping gesture, but when you consider the calibre of the writers who are their living peers, the new BritLit wannabes can sometimes appear mere gnats.

One such literary heavyweight is Doris Lessing. Born in what was then Persia in 1919, her British parents raised her in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and the tensions between her adopted homelands and her colonial upbringing were to have great influence on her thinking. An intellectual by dint of strong will more than education, she came to international acclaim as a novelist in the 50s for her Children of Violence series, concerning heroine Martha Quest.

Some of Lessing's most inventive works are her space-set Canopus in Argus series. Her wry, emotionally tortuous commentaries on the various worlds she depicts provide a window through which to view feminism, colonialism, and the enduring power of myth.

A recent collection of essays, Time Bites, contains reflections on her life, and discussions of her literary forebears, such as Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf and Muriel Spark. Her recent return to future-fiction, The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter indicates that her inventiveness is still as sharp and incisive as ever. Lessing will be reading excerpts from her work, and discussing her remarkable and ambitious career. One can only hope that come Zadie Smith's sixth decade of writing, she will have as much to talk about.