Stockholm - Ill health prevented British writer Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Literature Prize, from delivering her Nobel lecture in person Friday, but her message on the merits of literature and education was loud and clear. In the lecture, entitled "On Not Winning the Nobel Prize," Lessing contrasted the difference in access to books and the yearning to read among the rural poor in Zimbabwe and other developing nations with richer Western countries, and new technologies like computers and internet.
Lessing reflected on visits to Zimbabwe in the 1980s and during her time there before independence 1980, and on talks at privileged schools in London where pupils seemed not to comprehend the stark poverty she had witnessed, where "everyone begs for books".
"We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers," Lessing said.
Her British publisher Nicholas Pearson read her lecture at the Grand Hall of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm's Old Town. The academy selects the literature winner.
Just like the 2005 Literature Prize winner, British playwright Harold Pinter and the 2004 literature laureate Elfriede Jelinek of Austria, Lessing was to miss out on the December 10 award ceremony which marks the anniversary of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel's death.
In Zimbabwe, Lessing said she has supported efforts to distribute books to villagers and schools through a small organization.
In remarks likely to anger Zimbabwe's current government, Lessing said the "respect and hunger for books comes, not from (President Robert) Mugabe's regime, but from the one before it, the whites. It is an astonishing phenomenon, this hunger for books, and it can be seen everywhere from Kenya down to the Cape of Good Hope."
Lessing noted that access to books was something several previous laureates, including the 2006 winner Orhan Pamuk of Turkey, mentioned as a factor that fuelled their interest in literature and writing.
Another was finding "a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write," she said.
At 88, Lessing is the third-oldest Nobel laureate ever at the time of the December 10 award ceremony. The oldest, 90-year-old Leo Hurwicz - one of three Americans to share the 2007 Economics Prize - also did not to travel to Stockholm.
Hurwicz was to receive his prize worth 10 million kronor (1.53 million dollars), a medal and a diploma at the University of Minnesota on Monday.
A date has not been announced when Lessing is to be presented with her award in London.
Nobel, who invented dynamite, created the prizes, which are also awarded in medicine, physics, chemistry, peace and economics.
