Andi Oliver on Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Andi Oliver first read Toni Morrison's 'The Bluest Eye' she felt as though someone climbed inside her head.
Morrison's books saved the chef and broadcaster's life - both emotionally and cerebrally.
The author, editor and college professor Toni Morrison chronicled the lives of African-Americans in novels such as 'Beloved', 'Sula' and 'Song of Solomon'.
She once said that what drove her to write was "the silence of so many stories untold and unexamined". Born in Ohio, she was granddaughter to a slave, and her work often drew on the legacies of slavery, how it's carried down the generations.
Awarded both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize for Literature, her work was internationally acclaimed.
Joining Matthew Parris and Andi Oliver is Morrison's close friend Fran Lebowitz, and Howard University professor Dana Williams.
Producer: Eliza Lomas
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2020.
Transcript
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| 0:45.0 | She was the third beer, not the first one which the throat receives with almost tearful |
| 0:51.1 | gratitude, nor the second that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. |
| 0:56.7 | But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make? |
| 1:04.3 | This from her novel Song of Solomon is the writing of Tony Morrison. |
| 1:09.1 | Morrison once said that what drove her to write was the silence of so many stories untold and unexamined. |
| 1:17.1 | A writer of singular vision and towering ambition, Morrison chronicled the African American experience through works like |
| 1:24.3 | beloved, jazz and song of Solomon. This Nobel Prize winning author is the subject |
| 1:30.4 | of today's great lives chosen by Andy Oliver and Andy you're a chef |
| 1:35.7 | broadcaster, restaurateur judge on the great British menu is there a connection |
| 1:40.3 | between food and literature? Absolutely. I think I probably started daydreaming about things I could create in a kitchen |
| 1:50.0 | when I was quite young and was reading and food features so heavily in so many books |
| 1:55.3 | especially like young people's books the escapism of the novel and the |
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