speech

Now this is how you deliver a Nobel acceptance speech.

Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

I shamefully confess never having read one of her books.
In my professional life Lessing is one of those well regarded writers you continually pass over, sinking passionate defenses of her talent by noting the leaden unsalability of her catalog, aside from the very marginal Golden Notebook (a copy of which sat on our shelves for a year before the recent Nobel buzz hit).

But that is a hell of a speech.
I'll pick up one of her novels the next time opportunity presents.