doris lessing receives her nobel prize
Doris Lessing last night with fellow writer Ben Okri (Source: Evening Standard)
With my Institute for the Future of the Book hat on, I ended up last night at the party given to honour Doris Lessing for winning the Nobel Prize. She’d been too unwell to travel to Stockholm for the ceremony, and so her publishers threw a party for her at the spectacular Wallace Collection near Regent’s Park.
Doris Lessing’s in absentia acceptance speech has been a source of much aggrieved commentary by internet users resentful of her dismissal of the whole internet as ‘inanities’. In that context, I had a fascinating conversation with a senior BBC literary producer about the cultural gulf between those who swim confidently in the ocean of internet, and those still floundering in the n00b sea. It brought home to me even more forcefully than if:book’s current research project around literature organisations and digital media how much work there is to do both in finding bridges across that gap both for the fearful, but also a few routes back for those of us far enough out in planet geek that we forget that it has an edge, and that there might be a reason for that.
