American icon Toni Morrison has been awarded the 2016 PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction.

The award, which is presented to living American authors whose “scale of achievement in fiction, over a sustained career, places him or her in the highest rank of American literature”, is worth $25,000 (£18,000).

Morrison is famous for her epic, often historical writings about race, family and identity. She wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970 when she was 39, while working as a senior editor at Random House. Morrison won the Pulitzer prize in 1988 for her novel Beloved, which was adapted in 1998 into a film starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. She later won the 1993 Nobel prize in literature and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

The author was selected by a panel of judges including previous recipient Louise Erdrich – who won in 2014 – writer Francine Prose, and novelist and journalist Dinaw Mengestu.

In a statement on behalf of the judging panel, Erdich called Morrison’s work “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,” she said. “Toni Morrison not only opened doors to others when she began to publish, she has also stayed grounded in the issues of her time.

“At every turn, she has commented upon and enlarged the conversation about what it is to be black, female, human, universal. Her brilliant and bracing fiction continues to address what is crucial, timely and timeless.”

Morrison follows a prestigious list of previous winners of the PEN/Saul Bellow award including Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy and Philip Roth, who was the first recipient of the award in 2007 and was a close friend of Bellow’s.

Last week, the American Library Association announced that the 2016 Banned Books Week will spotlight works by authors of colour; Morrison is one of the most banned authors in American libraries, with her novels The Bluest Eye and Beloved both appearing in the top 10 most challenged books on multiple years.



Other 2016 PEN literary award winners include Lisa Ko, who won the $25,000 PEN/Bellwether prize for socially engaged fiction for her book The Leavers; Nancy Princenthal, who won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld award for her biography Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art; and Scott Ellsworth, who won the PEN/ESPN Award for literary sports writing for The Secret Game, about a 1944 basketball game that presaged the burgeoning civil rights movement.

The PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize for debut fiction, the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel award for the art of the essay, the PEN/E.O. Wilson literary science writing award, the PEN Open Book award for writers of colour, and the PEN/FUSION prize for emerging nonfiction writers will be announced in April.