US author Toni Morrison, whose 1987 novel "Beloved" about a runaway slave won a Pulitzer Prize and contributed to a body of work that made her the first black woman to be presented the Nobel Prize in Literature, has died at the age of 88, her publisher said.
Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for the publishing company Alfred A. Knopf, announced the death but did not provide an immediate cause. The Washington Post said she died on Monday at a New York hospital.
Morrison was a commercial as well as critical success, drawing praise for writing in a vivid, lyrical style while assessing issues of race, gender and love in American society.
"Beloved" was set during the U.S. Civil War and based on the true story of Sethe, a woman who killed her 2-year-old daughter to spare her from slavery. The woman was captured before she could kill herself and the child's ghost visits her mother.
Morrison told NEA Arts magazine in 2015 that she had already written a third of the book before deciding to bring in the ghost to address the morality of whether the mother was right to kill the child.
The New York Times called the death scene "an event so brutal and disturbing that it appears to warp time before and after into a single, unwavering line of fate. It will destroy one family's dream of safety and freedom; it will haunt an entire community for generations and ... it will reverberate in readers' minds long after they have finished this book."
The book was made into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey, who co-produced it, and Danny Glover. Winfrey was one of Morrison's biggest fans and featured four of her books in the influential book club portion of her daytime talk show.
The novel was part of a trilogy that Morrison said looked at love through the perspective of black history. "Jazz," published in 1992, was about a love triangle during the Harlem Renaissance in New York in the 1920s, and the third book, "Paradise," published in 1997, told of women in a small, predominantly black town.
'VISIONARY FORCE'
In honoring her with its literature prize in 1993, the Nobel organization said Morrison's novels were "characterized by visionary force and poetic import" while giving "life to an essential aspect of American reality."
Morrison was 39 years old when her first novel, "The Bluest Eyes" (1970) about a black girl who wanted blue eyes, was published. After working as an editor at a publishing house, she told panel discussion in 2016 that she wanted to "write the book that I really and truly wanted to read."
"I read all the time but I was never in those books," she said. "Or if I was, it was as a joke, or as some anecdote that explained something about the main character without the main character looking like me."
She followed that with "Song of Solomon" (1977), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, "Tar Baby" (1981) and "God Help the Child" (2015). Her nonfiction books included an essay collection, a book of literary criticism titled "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination" and editing anthologies.
Her 1986 play "Dreaming Emmett" was about Emmett Till, whose lynching in Mississippi in 1955 was a key moment in the U.S. civil rights movement.
Morrison was born on Feb. 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, and grew up in a family with a storytelling tradition. She graduated from Howard University in Washington, and earned a master's degree from Cornell University.
Morrison, whose only marriage ended in divorce, taught in colleges and was an editor at the publisher Random House before writing her own books. Later she would teach at Princeton University.
In 2012 Morrison was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama, who called her a national treasure.
"Her writing was not just beautiful but meaningful — a challenge to our conscience and a call to greater empathy," he wrote on Facebook in a post accompanied by a picture of him with Morrison in the Oval Office. "She was as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page."
"I can think of few writers in American letters who wrote with more humanity or with more love for language than Toni," Knopf Editor in Chief Sonny Mehta said. "... Her novels command and demand our attention. They are canonical works."
source: news.abs-cbn.com
NEW YORK - The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were awarded Pulitzer Prizes on Monday for their separate investigations of President Donald Trump and his family.
The Times won the prestigious journalism award for explanatory reporting for its probe of the Trump family's finances that "debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges," the Pulitzer Prize Board announced during a ceremony at New York's Columbia University.
Coverage of Trump's secret hush money payments to two women during his 2016 presidential campaign who claimed to have had affairs with him earned the Journal a national reporting nod.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel won the Pulitzer for public service for its coverage of failings by school and law enforcement officials before and after the February 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
In the breaking news category, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was honored for its coverage of the October 2018 shooting at a synagogue in the city that left 11 people dead.
Hannah Dreier of ProPublica won the prize for feature writing for a series of stories about immigrants from El Salvador living on New York's Long Island caught up in a crackdown on MS-13 gang members.
The Associated Press won a Pulitzer for international reporting for its coverage of the war in Yemen.
Reuters was honored for international reporting for its coverage of atrocities committed against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
Reuters also won in the breaking news photography category for pictures of migrants travelling to the United States from Central America.
In other categories, "The Overstory" by Richard Powers won the Pulitzer for fiction and "Fairview" by Jackie Sibblies Drury won the prize for drama.
The Pulitzer for history was awarded to David Blight for "Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom" while the biography prize went to Jeffrey Stewart for "The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke."
The poetry prize was won by Forrest Gander for "Be With."
In general non-fiction, the prize went to Eliza Griswold for "Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America."
The music award went to Ellen Reid for her operatic work "p r i s m."
Special citations were awarded to soul legend Aretha Franklin for her contributions to music and to the staff of the Capital Gazette newspaper of Annapolis, Maryland, which lost five employees in a June 2018 shooting.
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source: news.abs-cbn.com
Campaign reporting that exposed misleading claims by now US President Donald Trump about charitable giving and commentary about last year's divisive US presidential campaign won Pulitzer Prizes on Monday.
David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post won the national reporting award for what the board called "a model for transparent journalism" that cast doubt on Trump's assertions of charitable generosity.
Fahrenthold investigated not only Trump's claims of charitable giving but also disclosed that the Republican presidential candidate had boasted in crude terms of groping about women on tape in 2005.
The Pulitzer Prize for commentary went to Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal for what the board called "beautifully rendered columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation's most divisive political campaigns."
The coveted Public Service medal went to tabloid the New York Daily News and ProPublica for uncovering widespread abuse of eviction rules by the police to oust hundreds of people, most of them poor minorities.
The New York Times won the international reporting award for coverage of Vladimir Putin's efforts to project Russian power abroad, including assassinations online harassment and framing opponents.
The New York Times' C.J. Chivers also won the feature writing award for showing a Marine's postwar descent into violence.
Freelance photographer Daniel Berehulak won the Pulitzer for breaking news photography for images published in The New York Times showing killings amid the Philippines' war on drugs.
The Chicago Tribune on the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for portraying a 10-year-old boy and his mother striving to put the boy's life back together after he survived a shooting in Chicago.
The East Bay Times of Oakland, California won the breaking news category for covering a warehouse party fire that killed 36 people and exposing city failures to take action that might have prevented it.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
