Alice Walker

Alice Walker is an American author, poet, and essayist, born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children in a sharecropping family. She grew up in the segregated American South, was active in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and worked as a teacher and social worker before turning fully to writing. Her early collection «Once» (1968) established her as a poet before she became widely known as a novelist.

Walker is best known for her 1982 novel «The Color Purple», an epistolary work exploring race, gender, and resilience in the rural South, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award, making her the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer for fiction. The novel was later adapted into a celebrated film and a Broadway musical.

Beyond «The Color Purple», Walker has written extensively in short fiction, essays, and poetry, including «Everyday Use» and «The Flowers», and she coined the term womanism to describe a Black feminist perspective. Her work consistently centers the experiences of Black women, weaving together personal history, social justice, and lyrical prose, and she remains one of the most influential American writers of her generation.