American writer and activist Alice Walker was BOTD in 1944. Born in Eatonton in rural Georgia, she was educated at racially segregated schools. She won a scholarship to Spelmen College, where she met Martin Luther King Jnr, and later studied at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. In 1970, she published a poetry collection, Once and a novel The Third Life of Grange Copeland. She worked for the NAACP and in academia throughout the 1970s, promoting the work of Black female writers. Her 1975 essay Looking for Zora reignited interest in the life and work of writer Zora Neale Hurston. She is best known for her 1982 novel The Color Purple, the story of Celie, a young Black woman who survives sexual abuse and a violent marriage and forms a loving relationship with a female jazz singer. A national bestseller, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – making Walker the first Black woman to be so honoured – and was adapted into a successful film in 1985 starring Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. A musical version followed in 2005: the phenomenally successful 2015 Broadway revival won two Tony Awards, launching the career of its star Cynthia Erivo, and was adapted into a film in 2023. Walker’s other books include Repossessing the Secret of Joy, exploring female genital mutilation within African communities, and the memoir The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart, describing her seven year marriage to civil rights lawyer Melvyn Leventhal and the racism they experienced as an interracial couple. Walker had a daughter with Leventhal, and was in a relationship with singer Tracy Chapman in the 1990s. One of America’s most admired writers, her books are still banned in many American states.