Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison dies, aged 88
Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison has died aged 88.
Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for the publishing company Alfred A. Knopf, announced the death but did not provide an immediate cause. The Washington Post said she died on Monday at a New York hospital.
Ms Morrison was a commercial as well as critical success, drawing praise for writing in a vivid, lyrical style while assessing issues of race, gender and love in American society.
"Beloved", which won her a Nobel Prize in Literature, was set during the US Civil War and based on a true story of a woman who killed her 2-year-old daughter to spare her from slavery.
The book was made into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey, who co-produced it, and Danny Glover. Winfrey was one of Ms Morrison's biggest fans and featured four of her books in the influential book club portion of her daytime talk show.
"She was our conscience. Our seer. Our truth-teller," Winfrey said in an Instagram post.
"She was a magician with language, who understood the power of words. She used them to roil us, to wake us, to educate us and help us grapple with our deepest wounds and try to comprehend them."
In honouring her with its literature prize in 1993, the Nobel organisation said Ms Morrison's novels were "characterised by visionary force and poetic import" while giving "life to an essential aspect of American reality."
In 2012 Ms Morrison was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama, who called her a national treasure.
"Her writing was not just beautiful but meaningful — a challenge to our conscience and a call to greater empathy," Mr Obama wrote on Facebook in a post accompanied by a picture of him with Morrison in the Oval Office.
"She was as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page.”
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