Toni Morrison (Author) Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye , Sula , Beloved , Paradise and Love . She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight. Zadie Smith (Introducer) Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth , The Autograph Man , On Beauty , NW, Swing Time and The Fraud ; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia ; four collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free , Intimations and Dead and Alive ; a collection of short stories, Grand Union ; and the play, The Wife of Willesden , adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People . Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.