'Nobel Prize was a bloody disaster': Lessing tells how winning award stopped her writing

The Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing has said that winning the award was a "bloody disaster" for her, and fears she will never write again.

Lessing, 88, whose works include the feminist classic The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist, said instead of pursuing her first love of writing, her life was constantly disrupted by media requests.

When she won the Nobel Prize last year, Lessing, who lives in London, said it was "astonishing and amazing" and the completion of her "royal flush". But she has told BBC Radio that the glittering prize had since been a "bloody disaster" to her writing career instead of one of her crowning achievements.

"All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed," she told Radio 4's Front Row programme, in an interview to be broadcast tonight.

Lessing, the 11th woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature in its 106-year history, said the constant demands had made her tired. She believes her new book, a partly fictional memoir called Alfred and Emily – the names of her father and mother – will be her last.

Speaking about her writing, she said: "It has stopped, I don't have any energy any more. This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me – don't imagine you'll have it for ever. Use it while you've got it because it'll go, it's sliding away like water down a plughole."

Lessing, the author of more than 50 novels, volumes of short stories, memoirs and plays, said she had already spent much of the £775,000 prize money. "It has gone to my children, my grandchildren and my extended family. It will all be gone in two years. Anyway, my accountant tells me I should get rid of it. Give it away, otherwise the tax man will get it."

When a television crew told her she had just won the prize, as she returned to her home in north London after a trip to the local shops, she said: "Oh Christ! I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all; it's a royal flush."

The Swedish academy, which awards the prize, praised the author for her "scepticism, fire and visionary power". She did not travel to the ceremony in Stockholm last October because of ill-health.

It was presented to her earlier this year at the Wallace Collection in London by the Swedish ambassador, Staffan Carlsson. He said she was being "crowned with a prize you have long deserved". She replied: "Thank you does not seem enough when you've won the best of them all. It is astonishing and amazing."

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