Doris Lessing was born in British parents in Persia in 1919 and was taken to Southern Rhodesia when she was five. She spent her childhood on a large farm there and first came to England in 1949. She brought with her the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing, which was published in 1950 with outstanding success in Britain, in America, and in ten European countries. Since then her international reputation not only as a novelist, but as a non-fiction and short-story writer has flourished. For her collection of short novels, Five, she was honoured with the Somerset Maugham Award. She was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature 1981, and the German Federal Republic Shakespeare Prize of 1982. Among her other celebrated novels are the five-volume Children of Violence series, The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark, and Memoirs of a Survivor. Many of her short stories have been collected in two volumes entitled To Room Nineteen and The Temptation of Jack Orkney; while her African stories appear in This Was the Old Chief's Country and The Sun Between Their Feet.

Shikasta, the first in the series of novels with the overall title of CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES, was published in 1979; the second The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, in 1980; the third The Sirian Experiments, in 1981, when it was short-listed for the Booker McConnell Prize; the fourth The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, in 1982; and the fifth The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire, in 1983.