Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison, who has died aged 88, featured on ±«Óãtv television and radio for decades, including in ±«Óãtv One's in July 2015. Below we present a selection of bonus clips from the show, and look back at Morrison's appearances in the ±«Óãtv archive, beginning with an interview from the 1970s literature series Word for Word.
imagine... web exclusive clips
From the archive
-
![]()
Morrison talks to Vicky Payne about her novel Song of Solomon on Word for Word, a ±«Óãtv Two literary entertainment series from 1978.
-
![]()
Salman Rushdie presents a special episode of the Late Show from 1993 dedicated to Morrison and her work.
-
![]()
James Naughtie talks to Morrison about her Pulitzer Prize winning novel on Radio 4's Bookclub in June 1998.
-
![]()
Morrison talks to Mariella Frostrup about her novel A Mercy on Radio 4's Open Book in 2008, and also discusses Barack Obama's election victory that year.
-
![]()
In front of an audience of 2,000 at the 2014 Hay Festival, Razia Iqbal talks to Morrison about how she has challenged the ‘white gaze’ and how the US has confronted slavery.
-
![]()
Morrison joins Samira Ahmed in April 2015 to discuss her latest novel, which returns to the relationship between a mother and her children - a theme she explored in Beloved.
Toni Morrison talks to Kirsty Wark
Find out more
About the author
The phenomenal success of her novels meant few did more than Toni Morrison to bring the African-American experience into the mainstream, though Morrison always resisted attempts to make her a representative of her race, or her gender.
Read more
Morrison collected virtually every major prize for literature and is regarded as one of America’s greatest ever novelists. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, which she celebrated by dancing around her office.
Proving popular with readers as well as the literary establishment, her best-selling novel Beloved (1988) was voted by The New York Times as the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years.
The spell-binding Beloved is set in the mid-19th century and explores love and the supernatural. The main character, a former slave, is haunted by her decision to kill her infant daughter rather than see her returned to slavery.
Born in 1931, the ghost stories and folk tales her working-class parents told her were as much of an influence as the works of Tolstoy and Austen she was devouring from a young age. She worked as a literary editor and in academia, becoming a professor at Princeton in 1989. She then branched out into children's literature, working with her late son Slade on several titles.
Morrison continued to explore new art forms, writing the libretto for Margaret Garner, an American opera that explores the tragedy of slavery through the true life story of one woman's experiences. The opera debuted at the New York City Opera in 2007.
In 2012 President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom - the USA’s highest civilian honour.
Jenny Thompson, ±«Óãtv Readings Unit
-
![]()
Discover the best of books and authors from ±«Óãtv Arts
