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.
Morrison's fierce yearning for literature to be a more true and just realm over time, is a gift... [Mouth Full of Blood] is startling in its relevance to the conflicts and challenges of the present moment. In a time of turmoil and political greed, her writings have the power to bring, not a false comfort, but the hard-won belief that words can reshape the world. Toni Morrison's own words certainly have -- Nilanjana Roy * Financial Times * [Mouth Full of Blood] proves Morrison to be as astute and important an essayist as she is a novelist... These pieces are a wake-up call... [and] a brilliant insight into the mind and work of one of the world's finest writers -- Anita Sethi * i * Mouth Full of Blood demonstrate[s] the writer's enduring eagerness to examine the contradictions of being both native and alien to her own country... She takes pride in challenging a traditional literary canon... at every stage, the reader is grateful for an author allowing, encouraging even, such intimate access to their work, thought and reflections -- K Biswas * New Statesman * Morrison's voice rings out, bold and hopeful, welcoming us into a world where moral integrity reigns * Culture Whisperer * A large, rich, heterogeneous book, and hallelujah... Mouth Full of Blood is a bracing reminder of what words do, how carefully they should and can be used... magnificent [and] rigorously argued -- RO Kwon * Guardian *