Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, has added to her collection of controversial sound bites, telling the BBC on Sunday that receiving the award was "a bloody disaster" because it shifted her attention away from writing. "All I do now is give interviews and spend time being photographed," she said.
Since receiving the prestigious prize, worth approximately $1.5 million, Lessing has been outspoken, especially on political issues. Last October, shortly after the Nobel was awarded, she told the Spanish newspaper El País that Americans are "a very naive people, or they pretend to be," and that "September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible." In February, she told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that she believed Barack Obama would be assassinated if he were elected president. "He would probably not last long, a black man in the position of president," she said.
On Sunday, the eighty-eight-year-old author told the BBC that she has stopped writing since winning the Nobel. "I don't have any energy anymore," she said.
