The author, who was born into poverty yet went on to lift the Nobel prize, reveals abandoned plans in speech to students

As celebrities land book deals left, right and centre to detail the minutiae of their lives to date, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison has cancelled plans to write a memoir over concerns her life is not interesting enough.

Morrison, one of America's most celebrated novelists and the first black woman to win the Nobel prize for literature, was speaking to students at Oberlin College, Ohio, near the city of Lorain, where she was born in 1931. According to local press, she was asked if she intended to write an autobiography about her childhood in the area, and admitted that she had gone so far as to sign a contract for her next book to be a memoir.

"But then I cancelled it," she said. "My publisher asked me to do it, but there's a point at which your life is not interesting, at least to me. I'd rather write fiction."

Once described by the New York Times as "the nearest thing America has to a national novelist", Morrison won the Pulitzer prize for her 1987 novel Beloved, the story of a former slave haunted by the loss of her child. She won the Nobel prize for literature in 1993. Her new novel Home, out in May, tells of a Korean War veteran who returns to a racist America and must take his damaged sister back to the small Georgia town he hates.

Morrison's father was a welder and, the second of four children, she grew up poor. "After the war began, my parents had less and less, and their conflicts were the conflicts poor people have," she told the Guardian in 2008. She went on to become an editor at Random House, where she published Muhammad Ali's autobiography. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970, written while she was working full time and raising two children. The story was drawn from something a black girl had once told her: that she had prayed to be given blue eyes.

"People say to write about what you know," she told students in Oberlin. "I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever."