Toni Morrison death: Nobel Prize winning author dies aged 88

Megan White6 August 2019

Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison has died aged 88, a friend has confirmed.

The novelist, who also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, was lauded for her work examining life as an African American woman.

She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by her friend President Barack Obama in 2012, the highest civilian award in the US.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf says Ms Morrison passed away on Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

She was the first black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize, awarded in 1993. The Swedish academy hailed her use of language and her "visionary force."

The American author has died aged 88
Getty Images

Her novel Beloved, in which a mother makes a tragic choice to murder her baby to save the girl from slavery, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988.

Born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, Ms Morrison later attended Howard University, before earning a Masters of Arts at Cornell University.

She became an editor for Random House in 1965, before publishing her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970.

Beloved was later transformed into a movie adaptation, co-produced by Oprah Winfrey and starring Danny Glover and Thandie Newton.

Her work's popularity was boosted after Ms Winfrey chose four of her novels over six years for Oprah's Book Club, a segment of her show which had an average audience of 13 million.

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