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Toni Morrison, Nobel and Pulitzer winner author , dies aged 88

06 August 2019 17:48 (UTC +04:00)

US novelist Toni Morrison, who chronicled the African American experience in fiction over five decades, the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, has died aged 88, APA reports citing BBC.

In a statement on Tuesday, her publisher Knopf confirmed the news that the author died in Montefiore Medical Center in New York on Monday night.

Speaking after winning her Nobel prize in 1993, Morrison spelled out the dangers of “oppressive language [that] does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge” and offered instead a positive vision of “word-work” which “makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way in which we are like no other life”.

“We die,” she said. “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”