Toni Morrison was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Toni Morrison, the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, has died following a brief illness, her family said in a statement Tuesday. She was 88.

"It is with profound sadness we share that, following a short illness, our adored mother and grandmother, Toni Morrison, passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends," they said.

"Although her passing represents a tremendous loss, we are grateful she had a long, well lived life," the statement added, describing her as "the consummate writer who treasured the written word."

Morrison wrote 11 novels, many of them touching on life as a black American, in a glittering literary and award-laden career that lasted over six decades.

She won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for her 1987 novel "Beloved". Set after the American Civil War in the 1860s, the story centered on a slave who escaped Kentucky to the free state of Ohio.

The book was later turned into a film starring Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey.

Morrison received numerous other accolades including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

In 1996, she was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

In 2012 then President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and in 2016 she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

Tributes quickly poured in for her on Tuesday.

"She was a great woman and a great writer, and I don't know which I will miss more," Robert Gottlieb, Morrison's longtime editor at Knopf publishers, said in a statement sent to AFP.

Sonny Mehta, chairman of Knopf, said he could "think of few writers in American letters who wrote with more humanity or with more love for language than Toni."

"Her narratives and mesmerizing prose have made an indelible mark on our culture. Her novels command and demand our attention. They are canonical works, and more importantly, they are books that remain beloved by readers," he said.

Morrison was born in Ohio on February 18, 1931. "The Bluest Eye," her first novel, was published in 1970. She followed up with "Sula" in 1973, going on to publish another nine novels.

She also spent time as an editor at Random House and taught at Princeton University.

Morrison died at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York on Monday.