Alice Walker

Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944. The youngest of eight children in a sharecropping family, she grew up under segregation. In the 1960s she joined the civil rights movement and worked on voter registration in Mississippi.

Her novel “The Color Purple” (1982) follows Celie, a Black woman in the American South, as she survives abuse and discovers affection, independence and desire, including through her relationship with the singer Shug Avery. In 1983 Walker became the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel also won the National Book Award and was later adapted for film and the stage.

In her essays Walker developed the term “womanist” to describe a feminism rooted in Black women’s lives. Her 1975 essay about Zora Neale Hurston helped renew interest in a writer whose work had fallen out of public attention.

Walker has discussed relationships with women as well as men. Her public interventions have also attracted criticism: in 2018 she recommended a book by David Icke, a conspiracy theorist known for antisemitic claims. Her literary influence and civil rights work sit alongside continuing debate about those views.