Toni Morrison receives major PEN America award for enduring command of her art

Toni Morrison has been awarded the Saul Bellow Prize for American Fiction 2016, part of the 2016 PEN America awards, recognising  “her enduring command of her art”.  Morrison has previously won the The Pulitzer Prize for Beloved and, in 1993, the Nobel Prize in Literature. The PEN judges citation said her works have “changed the landscape of American fiction. Revelatory, intelligent, bold, her fiction is invested in the black experience, in black lives, and in black consciousness, material from which she has forged a singular American aesthetic. Toni Morrison not only opened doors to others when she began to publish, she has also stayed grounded in the issues of her time. At every turn, she has commented upon and enlarged the conversation about what it is to be black, female, human, universal. Her brilliant and bracing fiction continues to address what is crucial, timely and timeless.”