Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning US author, has died at the age of 88. Her family confirmed her death, saying she passed away peacefully on 5 August following a short illness, surrounded by family and friends.
Morrison was the author of 11 novels, including the acclaimed 1987 book Beloved, which told the story of a runaway female slave and was adapted into a film starring Oprah Winfrey. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, with the Swedish Academy praising her for giving life to an essential aspect of American reality through visionary force and poetic import.
Born in Ohio, Morrison began her career as an editor at Random House, where she was the first female African-American editor from 1967 to 1983. She championed writers of colour, publishing figures such as Gayl Jones, Henry Dumas, Muhammad Ali, and Angela Davis. Her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970 and broke new ground by focusing on the interior life of a young black girl.
Morrison received numerous honours, including the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1996 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2012. Obama remembered her as a national treasure whose writing challenged our conscience and moral imagination.
Tributes poured in from across the world, with former tennis champion Billie Jean King signing off with 'May she rest in power', and Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon calling her death a great loss. Morrison once said: 'We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.'
