Doris Lessing on her Nobel prize: There isn't anywhere to go from here

Writers including Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, Michael Holroyd and Ben Okri were among guests who saw the 88-year-old honoured on behalf of the Nobel academy.

Lessing, author of The Golden Notebook and The Grass Is Singing, was too ill with osteoporosis to travel to Stockholm to accept the prize when it was announced last month so Swedish ambassador Staffan Carlsson presented it to her last night at the Wallace Collection gallery, not far from where Lessing wrote The Golden Notebook nearly half a century ago.

The celebration was organised by HarperCollins, her publisher who will release her next novel, Alfred And Emily, in May, and Pen, the international writers' organisation.

Lessing, in deep red velvet, refused to discuss the significance of the honour with a truculence typical of her uncompromising single-mindedness.

But surrounded by friends and admirers including arts minister Margaret Hodge, artist Antony Gormley, the BBC's creative director Alan Yentob and actors Alan Rickman and Juliet Stevenson, she said of the celebration: "It's great fun."

Accepting the honour formally, she said: "There isn't anywhere to go from here, is there?"

She acknowledged all the great writers who fail to win awards as she entertained

guests by imagining her future entry into heaven. HarperCollins is giving 10,000 books to Zimbabwe, where the author lived early in her life, following Lessing's Nobel speech observations about the incredible hunger for reading in Africa.

Okri, a Booker Prize winner and friend, said: "For me, the great thing about Doris Lessing is that she's a transcender. She has the great capacity to be comfortable outside everybody else's comfort zones.

"She has a strong sensibility and resilience and has written a sustained exploration of what practically amounts to a summation of all the major themes of the 20th century - alienation, state ideology, freedom, gender, and so on."

Other guests included Joan Bakewell,

AC Grayling, Germaine Greer and Hari Kunzru. The ceremony was followed by a dinner for 50 of the author's friends and associates. Lessing, the oldest winner of the literature laureate, was shopping when her name was announced.

She arrived home in West Hampstead to be met by camera crews. Lessing said she had forgotten it was happening as her name had been on the shortlist for decades.

"You can't go on getting excited every year about this. There are limits to getting excited," she said.

"I swear, I'm going upstairs to find some suitable sentences which I will be using from now on. I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush."