An Excerpt from Doris Lessing's
Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

On Saturday, December 8, 2007, Doris Lessing, aged 88, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She has been writing extraodinary work for half a century with book like The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook, Memoirs of a Survivor, and Briefing for a Descent into Hell. Read here a brief excerpt of her acceptance speech that extolls the importance of stories and storytellers.

We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world, and that is where it is held today.

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.

Read the entire speech here.

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