STOCKHOLM (AFP) — British novelist and Nobel laureate Doris Lessing hailed the importance of books in her Nobel lecture Friday, juxtaposing poor countries' thirst for knowledge to a lack of interest shown by the young in rich countries.
The 88-year-old author was too ill to travel to Stockholm for the week-long Nobel festivities currently underway, and her lecture, "On not winning the Nobel Prize", was read at the Swedish Academy by her British editor Nicholas Pearson.
"We have a treasure-house -- a treasure -- of literature... It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to be come on it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be," she wrote.
But, she said, young people in wealthy countries have lost their interest in books, preferring instead television and Internet, which she described as a "revolution" whose effects the world has not reflected enough upon.
"How are we, our minds, going to change with the new Internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities," she wondered.
By contrast, developing countries can't get their hands on enough literature, she said.
"It is an astonishing phenomenon, this hunger for books, and it can be seen everywhere from Kenya down to the Cape of Good Hope," she wrote.
The writer mentioned particularly the case of Zimbabwe, formerly Southern Rhodesia where she grew up, describing miserable schools where the teachers "beg for books" despite Zimbabwean President Robert "Mugabe's reign of terror."
She concluded however on an optimist note, saying that the "storyteller is deep inside everyone of us."
"The storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us -- for good and for ill," she said.
"It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative."
The formal Nobel prize ceremony will be held in Stockholm on Monday.
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