Doris Lessing toasted her success with a gin and tonic today after being awarded the 2007 Nobel prize for literature.

The British novelist, who left school at the age of 13, was ecstatic to become the oldest ever winner at age 87.

Standing on her front doorstep of her house in Hampstead, she said: "I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I’m delighted to win them all, the whole lot . . . It’s a royal flush.”

Lessing, who wrote The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist, is the second UK winner in three years after Harold Pinter was awarded the honour in 2005.

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The award jury heralded five decades of epic novels and described Lessing as “that epicist of the female experience who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".

The prize was awarded for the body of literature compiled in more than fifty years of writing, covering feminism, politics and her youth in Africa.

She has written dozens of works from short stories to science fiction starting with The Grass is Singing in 1949.

Lessing was born in Iran before moving to Zimbabwe with her British parents in 1925. Her debut novel used her experience of growing up in Africa examining the relationship between a white farmer’s wife and her black servant.

Racial politics were a common theme throughout much of her work including the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994).

Because of her criticism of the South African regime, and its apartheid system, she was prohibited from entering the country between 1956 and 1995.

Lessing is only the 11th woman to have won the prize since it was first awarded in 1901.

Umberto Eco, an Italian author, who was thought to be in with a chance of winning the prize today, said Lessing richly deserved scooping the prize.

“She absolutely deserves it,” he said, adding the caveat that it was unusual for another British author to win just two years after Pinter.

She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize on three occasions. In 1971 her book Briefing for a Descent into Hell made the list, The Good Terrorist achieved the same honour in 1985 and then twenty years later she made the list for the first ever International Booker Prize.

Her breakthrough was the 1962 novel Golden Notebook, other works include the semi-autobiographical Children Of Violence series, largely set in Africa.

The prestigious £750,000 award is made annually by the Swedish academy named after the dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel.

In its citation announcing the prize the academy said: “The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that inform the 20th century view of the male-female relationship.”

In recent years her focus has shifted. “The vision of global catastrophe forcing mankind to return to a more primitive life has had special appeal for Doris Lessing. It reappears in some of her books of recent years,” the academy said.

Jane Friedman, the chief executive of Harper Collins, Lessing’s publisher said it was “wonderful news” that their author had won.

“We are very excited,” she said. “She has been an icon for women for a lifetime.”

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