“Beloved” author Toni Morrison received the 2016 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction Thursday at the PEN American Center in New York. The event, titled “Dangerous Work: An Evening With Toni Morrison,” was attended by hundreds, and featured an interview with the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize winner, who also read an excerpt from a new project she’s working on, The New York Times reports.
According to PEN, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, named in honor of author Saul Bellow, “goes to a living American author whose scale of achievement in fiction, over a sustained career, places him or her in the highest rank of American literature.” The award includes $25,000. Of the six authors to win the award since it launched in 2007, Morrison is the second woman. Louise Erdrich, author of “The Plague of Doves” and “The Round House,” took home the honor in 2014.
Erdich served as an awards judge this year. “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,” Erdrich said in a statement. “Toni Morrison not only opened doors to others when she began to publish, she has also stayed grounded in the issues of her time.”
“The 90-minute event was a tribute to [Morrison’s] ideas and to the music of her language, fitting for a writer who has collaborated on an opera and called one of her novels ‘Jazz,’” the NYT writes. The evening included performances by opera singer Alicia Hall Moran and composer-pianist Jason Moran.
Morrison emphasized how “meaningful” each of her books are to her. The 85-year-old acknowledged that she may not get “another half or full decade,” so she wanted to share an excerpt from a novel that she’s currently writing. The NYT writes that the opening section of the novel is “narrated by a mute.”
In 1998, Morrison’s “Beloved” was adapted for the big screen. The film starred Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, and Thandie Newton. Morrison’s latest book, “Sweetness,” hit shelves in February 2015.
