The Nobel Prize-winning US author Toni Morrison has died at the age of 88.
The Morrison family confirmed "with profound sadness" that Morrison had died "following a short illness".
The author of 11 novels, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, having published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970.
Her 1987 book Beloved told the story of a runaway female slave and was made into a film starring Oprah Winfrey in 1998.
In 1996 she was honoured with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters,
In 2012, President Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Morrison was also the first female African-American editor at Random House, where she had the role from 1967 to 1983.
She championed writers of colour and published the likes of Gayl Jones, Henry Dumas, Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis, among others.
Source: BBC