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Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature 1993, the last American to do so, and she remains a towering figure in literature today.

Her works range from her first book The Bluest Eye about an African American girl who wants blue eyes, and Beloved about the impact of 200 years of slavery. She has always written from the perspective of being an African American woman yet her writing has become emblematic about an essential aspect of American reality.

In front of an audience of 2,000 at Hay Festival 2014 Razia Iqbal talks to Toni Morrison about how she has challenged the ‘white gaze’ and, with the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War in America next year, how has the US confronted what was at the heart of that war, slavery?

Picture: Toni Morrison, Credit: Francois Durand/Getty Images