British author Doris Lessing, whose powerful feminist and anti-colonial writing won her the Nobel Literature Prize, has died at the age of 94.

The author’s longtime agent and friend Jonathan Clowes said Lessing had died peacefully at her London home in the early hours of Sunday morning.

“She was a wonderful writer with a fascinating and original mind,” Clowes said.

“It was a privilege to work for her and we shall miss her immensely.”

Best known for the 1962 novel The Golden Notebook which is today considered a landmark feminist work, Lessing became the oldest winner of the Nobel Literature Prize in 2007.

She penned more than 50 novels ranging from political critiques to science fiction — many of them inspired by her own experiences of a lonely childhood in Africa and involvement in radical leftist politics.

She was out grocery shopping when she was announced as the winner of the Nobel Literature Prize, and only found out when she returned home to find journalists swarming on her doorstep.

Her reaction was a characteristic: “Oh, Christ.”

Nicholas Pearson, her editor at HarperCollins, said Lessing’s life and career had been “a great gift to world literature”.

“She wrote across a variety of genres and made an enormous cultural impact,” he said in a statement.

“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.”

Charlie Redmayne, CEO of HarperCollins UK, said Lessing was “a compelling storyteller with a fierce intellect and a warm heart”.

Tributes poured in for the writer on Twitter, while the Swedish author Per Wastberg pronounced her “one of the world’s greatest contemporary writers”.

“At an advanced age, she wrote some very beautiful works,” Wastberg told the Swedish news agency TT.

“I think her books will pass into posterity.”

Lessing published her first novel The Grass Is Singing in 1950. She went on to pen operas, short stories and two plays as well as dozens of other novels, including several science fiction works.

On granting her the Nobel Literature Prize, the Swedish Academy praised the “scepticism, fire and visionary power” with which she had examined her own society.

Among the other awards she has won are the Prix Medicis in 1976 and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1995.

Born in what is now Iran in 1919, Lessing was raised by British parents in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. She taught herself from the age of 13 by reading authors such as Dickens and Tolstoy.

After running away from her second husband and moving to Britain in 1949, she became involved in the British Communist Party but resigned in 1956 at the time of the Hungarian uprising.

She became an increasingly outspoken critic of corruption and embezzlement by African governments and repeatedly used her razor-sharp writing to attack colonialism.

She was barred entry to South Africa in 1956, but was finally able to revisit in 1995, after the fall of apartheid.

Twice divorced, Lessing is survived by a daughter and two granddaughters.