Toni Morrison, the first black woman to receive the Nobel prize for literature in 1993, has died in New York following a brief illness.

The Swedish academy hailed her use of language and her ”visionary force.”

Her novel ”Beloved,” in which a mother makes a tragic choice to murder her baby to save the girl from slavery, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988.

In 2012, then U.S. President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Obama remembers her as ”a national treasure” who was ”as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page.”