Q&A with Doris Lessing, awarded Nobel Prize for literature

For 25 years, Doris Lessing has lived in a small row house in a North London neighborhood that abuts the cemetery where Sigmund Freud is buried. Each morning, the 87-year-old Nobel prize winner rises at 5 a.m. and feeds several hundred birds. She then returns home, makes breakfast and is usually at her desk by 9, where she writes because, as she puts it in her plain and simple terms, "it is what I do."

BY JOHN FREEMAN

October 11, 2007