Nobel laureate Toni Morrison dead at 88

Toni Morrison, the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and one of America’s best loved writers, has died following a brief illness, her family said in a statement yesterday. She was 88. Barack Obama -- who awarded Morrison the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- led the tributes, describing her as “a national treasure, as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page.”

“Her writing was a beautiful, meaningful challenge to our conscience and our moral imagination. What a gift to breathe the same air as her, if only for a while,” the former US president wrote on Twitter. Morrison 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. She also penned numerous essays, poems and speeches and was often referred to as America’s “conscience” for her poignant takes on race and human rights, never afraid of commenting on the day’s weightiest political issues.

Her family said she “passed away peacefully” in a New York hospital on Monday night “surrounded by family and friends.” “Although her passing represents a tremendous loss, we are grateful she had a long, well lived life,” they said in a statement, describing her as “the consummate writer who treasured the written word.” Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award  in 1988 for  her 1987 novel “Beloved.”

Set after the American Civil War in the 1860s, the story centered on a slave who escaped Kentucky to the free state of Ohio. The book was later turned into a film starring Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey. Morrison received numerous other accolades including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. In 1996, she was honored with the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

In 2012, Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and in 2016 she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. “She was a great woman and a great writer, and I don’t know which I will miss more,” Robert Gottlieb, Morrison’s longtime editor at Knopf publishers, said in a statement.