Alice Malsenior Walker was born on 9 February 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children of sharecropper parents, and was blinded in one eye by a childhood accident, an experience she has said turned her toward the introspection that shaped her writing.
Walker attended Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College, and became active in the civil rights movement in Mississippi during the 1960s, an involvement that deeply informed the themes of racial and gender injustice running through her subsequent fiction.
In 1982 Walker published The Color Purple, an epistolary novel depicting the lives of Black women in the rural American South, which won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 1983, making Walker the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer for fiction.
The Color Purple was adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 film directed by Steven Spielberg and later into a Broadway musical, dramatically expanding the novel's cultural reach and cementing Walker's place as one of the defining American writers of her generation.
Walker coined the term 'womanist' to describe a Black feminist perspective distinct from mainstream feminism, and has continued publishing novels, poetry and essays addressing race, gender and social justice throughout a career spanning more than five decades.
- First Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1983
- Author of The Color Purple, winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize
- Coined the term 'womanist' to describe Black feminist perspective
- Active civil rights movement participant in 1960s Mississippi
- Personal hardship can become a source of creative insight. Walker has described the childhood accident that blinded her in one eye as pivotal to the introspective sensibility of her writing.
- A single novel can shift an entire literary landscape. The Color Purple's success opened wider recognition for Black women's voices across American literature.