Toni Morrison

An American novelist and editor whose fiction, centered on Black American life and history, combines lyrical, densely allusive prose with unflinching treatment of slavery's legacy, memory and trauma. Before her own novels found wide readership, she worked for nearly two decades as a book editor at Random House, where she championed a generation of Black writers into print; her own fiction, beginning with The Bluest Eye in 1970, drew increasing critical recognition through the following two decades. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the first Black woman to receive it.