This year's Literature Nobel Prize [Images] winner Doris Lessing has stirred a hornet's nest when she said that the September 11 attacks were "not that terrible" compared to the Irish Republican Army's terror campaign.

"September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible," the 88-year-old writer, whose novels include The Golden Notebook and Memoirs of a Survivor, told the Spanish newspaper, El Pais. "Some Americans will think I'm crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think."

Lessing also branded US President George W Bush [Images] 'a world calamity'. "Everyone is tired of this man. Either he is stupid or he is very clever, although you have to remember he is a member of a social class which has profited from wars."

She also said that she "always hated Tony Blair [Images] from the beginning". "Many of us hated Tony Blair. I think he has been a disaster for Britain and we have suffered him for many years. I said it when he was elected: 'This man is a little showman who is going to cause us problems.' And he did."

Image: Doris Lessing addresses the media outside her home in north London [Images], October 11, after winning the Nobel Literature Prize