TELL Magazine

The first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison has died during a brief illness. She was 88.

Toni Morrison passed away on Monday and surrounded by family and friends. She was an American novelist, essayist, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University.

Born in Ohio on February 18, 1931, Morrison published her first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” in 1970. She followed up with “Sula” in 1973, going on to publishing another nine novels.

The novelist wrote 11 novels, many of them touching on life as a black American, in a glittering literary and award-laden career that lasted over six decades.

Morrison received numerous other accolades including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. In 1996, she was honoured with the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

 Also, in 2012, Former US President, Barack Obama, presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and in 2016 she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. Morrison died at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York on Monday.