Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was an American novelist, essayist and academic, born in Lorain, Ohio, on 18 February 1931 and died on 5 August 2019. She worked as an editor and taught at universities, including Princeton, while building a body of fiction that placed Black American lives at the centre of the national story. Her novels combine lyrical language, folklore, history and moral urgency, often exploring memory, community, family and the lasting effects of slavery and racism. She also wrote essays and criticism that reshaped discussion of race and American literature. In 1993 she became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her work remains widely read in schools and by general readers, and she is regarded as one of the most important American writers of her era.