Who was the oldest person to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Doris Lessing was the oldest person to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, receiving the award at age 88 in 2007.

Lessing was born on 22 October 1919, and the Swedish Academy announced her prize on 11 October 2007, shortly before her eighty-eighth birthday. The Academy described her as an epicist of the female experience who examined divided civilization with skepticism, fire, and visionary power.

Her major works include The Golden Notebook, The Grass Is Singing, and the Canopus in Argos series. Her fiction often addresses politics, gender, colonialism, and social change.

Lessing initially reacted to the announcement with surprise and irritation at the media attention, famously calling the Nobel news a catastrophe. Her age record concerns the recipient’s age at the award, not the age at which she began writing.