A SMALL PERSONAL VOICE - Softcover

An essential and definitive collection of the Nobel Prize for Literature winner’s finest essays, reviews, reminiscences and interviews from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

‘The novelist talks as an individual to individuals, in a small personal voice. In an age of committee art, public art, people may begin to feel again a need for the small personal voice; and this will feed confidence into writers and, with confidence because of the knowledge of being needed, the warmth and humanity, and love of people which is essential for a great age of literature.’

In this collection of her non-fiction, Lessing’s own life and work are the subject of a number of pieces, as are fellow writers such as Isak Dinesen and Kurt Vonnegut. There are essays on Malcolm X and Sufism, discussions of the responsibility of the artist, thoughts on her exile from Southern Rhodesia, and a fascinating memoir of her fraught relationship with her mother.

Lit throughout by Doris Lessing's desire for truth-telling, ‘A Small Personal Voice’ is both an important collection of writings by and a self-portrait of one of the most significant writers of the past century.

'A Small Personal Voice' is an essential and definitive collection of Doris Lessing's finest essays, reviews, reminiscences and interviews from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Displaying to the full the extraordinary range of her intellectual curiosity, this volume includes tributes to fellow writers such as Isak Dinesen, Olive Schreiner and Kurt Vonnegut, essays on Malcolm X and Sufism, discussions of the responsibility of the artist, reflections on her political exile from Southern Rhodesia, and a recent, remarkable memoir of her combative and complicated relationship with her mother. Witty, acute, illuminated throughout by Doris Lessing's distinctive passionate honesty, 'A Small Personal Voice' is a fascinating self-portrait of one of this century's most provocative and influential writers.

'The Golden Notebook, The Fifth Child, London Observed, African Laughter' and many other Doris Lessing books are available in Flamingo.

'In an essay to accompany a reprint of Olive Shreiner's 'Story of an African Farm', Doris Lessing takes Schreiner's strange and beloved book and simply in telling its story reveals its inner logic just the way she does the lives of her most densely imagined characters. 'My father' is quite simple, loving, cleansing. She lights up this sketch with forgiveness and wonder, and does it with those firm-treading steps of hers that keep saying: this is how it was, had to be. There's no one like her.'
ROGER SALE, 'New York Times'

'It is Doris Lessing's peculiar gift to write with the kind of honesty and generosity that suggests to the reader he is privileged to be a friend, to feel he knows something of the true ideals, the private agonies and delights that have inspired her writing.'
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT