Doris Lessing, who died peacefully on Nov 18, aged 94, was an immensely important and innovative writer, the recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature and a rare, unconventional woman who fearlessly explored uncharted territory in her work. From the very first, she spoke out boldly against social iniquity and prejudices of race and gender. Her extensive oeuvre ranged from some 50 novels to story collections, librettos, memoirs and essays. Her vision and her concerns encompassed the human condition across the globe and the role of the individual in the collective.

Lessing’s non-fiction includes the little known The Wind Blows Away Our Words (1987), a slim book about her trip to Peshawar and neighbouring districts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In a 1988 interview with me for Dawn, she said: “No one ever says Pakistan is so beautiful it takes your breath away. As for Chitral, even now I can’t believe anything so wonderful. I want to go there again to see more of the country. But this woman business — being stared at all the time, as if you were a giraffe from outer space — gets you down after a while. You walk down a street, you are followed by hundreds of melancholy, speculative dark eyes. Then, buying an airline ticket, not once does the man look at you. Not once. It’s as if you are an empty space.”

Lessing’s trip to Pakistan was organised by a London-based charity, Afghan Aid, and the aim of her book was to raise consciousness for the cause. The poetic title draws on the words of a mujahideen commander. With the benefit of hindsight, her narrative, despite its debatable conclusions, makes fascinating reading because it captures a moment in time with no inkling of the new conflict to come. The book is also filled with vivid images of Pakistan including the historic but disordered Dean’s Hotel where Doris Lessing stayed and where she tripped over a spike and broke her wrist. “I have seldom written a book under more difficult circumstances,” she said.

Doris Lessing came to Pakistan with a group which included Idries Shah, the author of The Way of the Sufis and Caravan of Dreams. He is also known as a profound influence on Lessing who was known for her interest in Sufism. She told me, “I have studied Sufism, but I don’t think my work has been all that influenced by it.” But she would not discuss the subject further.

However, several critics have commented on the Sufi influence in some of Lessing’s novels, including her science fiction series, Canopus in Argos. This spectacular sequence with stunning imagery creates a wondrous mystical version of the world. Composer Philip Glass developed two Canopus novels, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 and Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five, into an opera for which Lessing wrote the libretto.

She also told me she loved the inflexions of Persian. She had learnt a little through a teach-yourself course and used her large Persian dictionary to find words with the right resonances for Canopus in Argos books which included the planet Shikasta and a disruptive force Shammat. She had also considered learning Arabic at one point.

My interview took place in her home in London, a city Lessing loved, and her conversation reflected the irony, humour and vibrant descriptions that I associated with her novels. Years later, at the close of the century, I heard her speak at a Cambridge seminar, where she said, “When I was a girl, the British Empire was infallible. The USSR stretched across the Baltic. There was Hitler and Mussolini. Spain and Portugal were dictatorships. There was White Supremacy. They looked eternal. They have all vanished as if they never were.”

Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Kermanshah, Iran. Her father, a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia, had lost a leg during World War I; her mother was a nurse. When Lessing was five, her parents acquired a farm in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) with dreams of becoming rich, only to be confronted with a harsh, hard and lonely life. By her mid-teens Lessing had dropped out of school and started to think that there was something very wrong with a social system where she and her family belonged to a small white minority, surrounded by Africans working for them reluctantly.

At 15, Lessing left home and started to read voraciously. In time she also joined the hugely influential New Left Club started by the publisher Gollancz. But there was no one in her milieu that she could talk to. She worked as a nursemaid and telephone operator, married at 19 and became a mother of two but she was soon bored mindless and her marriage collapsed. Meanwhile, the outbreak of the World War II brought European refuges, RAF officers and other liberal, educated people to Rhodesia. They shared her ideas. She became an active member of the banned Communist Party of Rhodesia, which led to her first friendships with black people. She also married one of its core members, Gottfried Lessing, a German refugee.

In 1949 the marriage ended. Lessing arrived in London with her little son Peter Lessing and the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing, which was an instantaneous success on both sides of the Atlantic. But it also caused outrage for its unflinching portrait of the Empire and its neurosis. The novel tells of a murder revolving around the relationship between a white settler’s wife and a black servant.

Lessing eventually turned to different philosophies and slowly moved away from politics to concentrate on writing. She drew on her own turbulent life for the portrayal of Martha Quest in her famous Children of Violence sequence (1952-1969) but made a major breakthrough with The Golden Notebook (1962) which is considered an iconic feminist work; it uses innovative techniques to reconstruct through several narratives the tale of Anna Wulf, a woman struggling with breakdown. This is the novel most frequently discussed in Lessing’s obituaries but the fact is that most of her work was truly extraordinary. In 1988, her horror story, The Fifth Child, marked a new departure and has been compared to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It tells of a woman who gives birth to a monster. Her last novel, Alfred and Emily (2008), looks back at the lives of her parents and pre-supposes that their marriage never took place.

Doris Lessing will be greatly missed.

The writer is a literary critic