Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, passed away Sunday in London at age 94. Although she was best known as a novelist, poet, librettist and playwright, Lessing also tried her hand at graphic novels with Playing the Game, a 1995 fantasy drawn by Charlie Adlard.

Born in Iran in 1919, and raised in the African bush in Zimbabwe, Lessing began her writing career at age 15, selling short stories to South African magazines. An opponent of apartheid, her first novel The Grass is Singing (1950) addressed racial politics, while her breakthrough work, 1962's The Golden Notebook, featured anti-war and anti-Stalinist messages and became a pioneering work of the burgeoning women's movement. She wrote more than 50 books.

In 2007, the 88-year-old Lessing became the oldest author, and only the 11th woman, to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. As The Guardian recounts, she was returned to her London home after a day of shopping to find reporters on her doorstep. When she learned she had won the prize, which comes with $1.5 million, Lessing replied, "Oh, Christ," adding, "I couldn't care less."

She then remarked, ""I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. I'm 88 years old (it was a few days before her birthday) and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off."

Lessing is also celebrated for her science fiction novels like Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, Memoirs of a Survivor and the Canopus in Argos: Archives series.

"Doris's long life and career was a great gift to world literature," Nicholas Pearson, her editor at Harper Collins, said in a statement. "She wrote across a variety of genres and made an enormous cultural impact. Probably she'll be most remembered for The Golden Notebook which became a handbook to a whole generation, but her many books have spoken to us in so many various ways. Doris has been called a visionary and, to be in her company, which was a privilege I had as her editor towards the end of her writing life, was to experience something of that. Even in very old age she was always intellectually restless, reinventing herself, curious about the changing world around us, always completely inspirational. We'll miss her hugely."