Nobel Prize winner US author Toni Morrison dies aged 88

Nobel Prize-winning US author Toni Morrison has died at the age of 88.

Her family confirmed “with profound sadness” that Morrison had died “following a short illness”.

Author of 11 novels, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, having published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970. When she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy described her as an author “who in novels characterised by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality”.

Her 1987 book Beloved told the story of a runaway female slave and was made into a film starring Oprah Winfrey in 1998.

Via The New York Times / The Guardian