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Nobel Prize-winning writer Doris Lessing was under surveillance for more than 20 years during her youth by British spies who took a dim view of her Communist beliefs and anti-racist activism, declassified intelligence files have revealed.

Lessing first came to the attention of colonial-era intelligence agents in 1943 in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where she grew up, and from then on spies kept tabs on her in Africa and Britain until 1964.

The author of "The Golden Notebook", one of the most influential novels of the 1960s, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. She died in 2013 aged 94.

MI5, Britain's internal intelligence service, had built up a five-volume secret file on Lessing that has now been placed in the National Archives and was made public on Friday, Reuters reports.