Doris Lessing was out grocery shopping near her home in London yesterday when the Swedish Academy announced she had won the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature. She returned from the store to find a media circus, the wire services reported. "Oh Christ!" she said, when told about the monumental honor. "I couldn't care less." "This has been going on for 30 years," Lessing told the journalists. "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush." Holding an impromptu news conference, the prickly Lessing said, "I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. . . . I'm 88 years old 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."

Jonathan Burnham of HarperCollins, Lessing's publisher in the United States, was at the Frankfurt Book Fair when the announcement was made. "Doris is one of the most important writers of this generation," he said from Germany. "And as a woman writer, she has broken through boundaries and given inspiration to a whole new generation." For six decades, British novelist Lessing has written works of fiction that explore the sometimes painful intertwining of the political and the personal. In awarding her the prize-of-all-writing-prizes, the academy championed Lessing as "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

Lessing's work had been of great importance both to other writers and to the broader field of literature, academy secretary Horace Engdahl told Reuters. He said members of the academy had discussed her as a potential laureate for years. "Now the moment was right. Perhaps we could say that she is one of the most carefully considered decisions in the history of the Nobel Prize," Engdahl told the news service. "She has opened up a new area of experience that earlier had not been very accepted in literature. That has to do with, for instance, female sexuality."

The Swedish Academy said on Friday it will announce the 2007 Nobel Laureate in Literature on October 11, with odds-makers tipping well-tried names to take a prize that often goes to the obscure or controversial. Bookmaker Ladbrokes, which takes bets on the literary world's most prestigious award, has Italian novelist and essayist Claudio Magris as its favorite, followed by Australian "bush" poet Les Murray and American novelist Philip Roth. Swedish poet Thomas Transtromer lies fourth on the list with Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis in fifth.

Barring Murray, all have been suggested as possible winners in years past. The short list for the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.54 million) prize is closely guarded and the winner is often a surprise -- sometimes obscure enough to send reporters and literary scholars scurrying to reference books or the Internet. But Ladbrokes has called it right for three years running with the leader in its wagering winning the Nobel, including last year's winner, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk was seen as a politically-charged choice in a year that saw him charged with violating a hotly debated law prohibiting insults to "Turkishness."

The Swedish Academy says politics played no role. "It was a decision taken on purely literary grounds. There is never a political aim in the Academy's decision," Academy head Horace Engdahl told Reuters in an e-mail interview this week. "There is sometimes a political effect, but in that case it is unintended and usually not calculable in advance."

British playwright Harold Pinter, whose sparse style and use of silences has given rise to the adjective "Pinteresque", was the surprise winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005 on Thursday.

The 75-year-old Londoner, son of a Jewish dressmaker, is one of Britain's best-known writers for works such as "The Birthday Party" and "The Caretaker". But critics said he was an unexpected pick for the 10 million crown prize.

Pinter "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms", said the Swedish Academy. Its head Horace Engdahl called him "the towering figure" in English drama in the second half of the 20th century. An accomplished actor and director, Pinter is also known for screenplays for film and television, such as the 1981 movie "The French Lieutenant's Woman", based on John Fowles' novel.

An outspoken voice on politics and human rights, Pinter was described by one biographer as "a permanent public nuisance, a questioner of accepted truths, both in life and art".