Alice Walker – författare

Read the original inspiration for the new, boldly reimagined film from producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, starring Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, and Fantasia Barrino.

Celebrating its fortieth anniversary, The Color Purple writes a message of healing, forgiveness, self-discovery, and sisterhood to a new generation of readers. An inspiration to authors who continue to give voice to the multidimensionality of Black women’s stories, including Tayari Jones, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Jesmyn Ward, and more, The Color Purple remains an essential read in conversation with storytellers today.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award! 

A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early-twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning nearly thirty years, first from Celie to God, then from the sisters to each other, the novel draws readers into a rich and memorable portrayal of Black women—their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery.

Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, The Color Purple breaks the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, and carries readers on an epic and spirit-affirming journey toward transformation, redemption, and love.

“Reading The Color Purple was the first time I had seen Southern, Black women’s literature as world literature. In writing us into the world—bravely, unapologetically, and honestly—Alice Walker has given us a gift we will never be able to repay.” —Tayari Jones

“The Color Purple was what church should have been, what honest familial reckoning could have been, and it is still the only art object in the world by which all three generations of Black artists in my family judge American art.” —Kiese Laymon

En stor amerikansk klassiker:

Celia skriver brev till Gud. Hon är 14 år, och hennes far misshandlar och våldtar henne. I det tidiga 1900-talets amerikanska sydstater står svarta kvinnor lägst i varje rangordning. Celia har redan fått ett barn, som fadern tagit ifrån henne. När hon är gravid med sitt andra blir hon bortgift mot sin vilja, och hennes mor förbannar henne på sin dödsbädd. Även för systern Nellie väntar ett liv med fattigdom, rasism och manligt våld, men hon försvinner, och de två kommer att vara åtskilda i trettio år. Purpurfärgen är en stor amerikansk roman, som redan vid utgivningen hyllades och ifrågasattes. Det kvinnliga perspektivet lade ytterligare dimensioner till skildringen av rasistiskt förtryck i USA, och romanens många starka kvinnoporträtt har gjort den älskad och läst av ständigt nya generationer - en modern klassiker som kastar skoningslöst ljus över en våldsam historia och ett våldsamt land.I översättning av Kerstin Hallén och med ett nyskrivet förord av författaren Balsam Karam.

ALICE WALKER, född i Georgia 1944, är en amerikansk författare och aktivist. Purpurfärgen, hennes mest kända roman, belönades med både Pulitzerpriset och National Book Award 1983 och filmatiserades 1986.

A poignant and powerful story of the American South in the 1960s and of one woman who risks her life for the people she loves from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, now available in a new edition featuring an introduction by Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage.

“A classic novel of both feminism and the Civil Rights movement.” —Ms. Magazine

“My life suddenly made sense when I encountered Alice Walker''s fiction.” —Tayari Jones 

Meridian Hill, a dedicated and courageous young activist in the 1960s, works to create peace and understanding through her civil rights work, touching the lives of all those she meets even when her health begins to deteriorate. With the old rules of Southern society collapsing around her, her coworkers quitting and moving to comfortable homes and lives, and others turning to more violent means of achieving change, Meridian fights a lonely battle to reaffirm her own humanity—and that of all her people.

In this groundbreaking classic essay collection, Alice Walker speaks out as a Black woman, writer, mother, and feminist on topics ranging from the personal to the political.

Originally published forty years ago, Alice Walker’s first collection of nonfiction is a dazzling compendium that remains both timely and relevant. In these thirty-six essays, Walker contemplates her own work and that of other writers, considers the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and writes vividly and courageously about a scarring childhood injury. Throughout, Walker explores the theories and practices of feminism, incorporating what she calls the “womanist” tradition of black women—insights that are vital to understanding our lives and society today.

“When I graduated from college, my father gave me Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. It was a beaten-up paperback in 1999, and it’s even more battered now.” —Jesmyn Ward

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

In this “brilliant” (Essence) sequel to The Color Purple, Alice Walker weaves an intricate, rich tapestry of interrelated lives.

Celie and Shug from The Color Purple subtly shadow the lives of the dozens of astonishing characters in The Temple of My Familiar, all of whom are dealing in some way with the legacy of the African experience in America. From recent African immigrants to a woman who grew up in the mixed-race rainforest communities of South America to Celie’s own granddaughter living in modern-day San Francisco, they must come to terms with the brutal stories of their ancestors in order to confront their own troubled lives.

Described by the author as “a romance of the last 500,000 years,” The Temple of My Familiar creates a new mythology from old fables and history, and along with it a profoundly spiritual explanation for centuries of shared African American experience.

“The richness of [this] novel is amazing, overwhelming. A hundred themes and subjects spin through it, dozens of characters, a whirl of time and places. None is touched superficially: all the people are passionate actors and sufferers, and everything they talk about is urgent, a matter truly of life and death. They’re like Dostoyevsky’s characters, relentlessly raising the great moral questions and pushing one another towards self-knowledge, honesty, engagement.” —Ursula K. LeGuin

''These journals are a revelation, a road map and a gift to us all'' TAYARI JONES, author of An American Marriage''Walker writes beautifully about the push and pull of intimacy . . . You find yourself admiring her idealism, her gift as a writer and her abundant appetite for life'' THE TELEGRAPHFrom the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire presents four decades'' worth of personal journals to offer a passionate, intimate record of Alice Walker''s intellectual, artistic and political development. Walker writes in an unvarnished and singular voice about an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with civil rights foot soldiers, marrying a Jewish lawyer and defying 1960s anti-interracial marriage laws, writing her first novel, experiencing the trials and triumphs of the women''s movement, being both admired and maligned for her work and activism, burying her mother and estrangement from her daughter. Her journals reveal an inextricable intertwining of the personal and political, exploring her thoughts and feelings in real time as a woman, writer, African American, wife, daughter, mother, lover, sister, friend and citizen of the world.

A memoir about keeping chickens from the author of THE COLOR PURPLEWhen Alice Walker grew up in the deep south of America, her family always kept chickens - for meat and for eggs - and her job was to chase down the Sunday dinner! In later life, when she settled in Mexico and was growing her own food, she realised how much she missed keeping them and decided to get a brood of her own. So into her life came Gertrude Stein, Babe, Babe 2, Hortensia, Splendor, Glorious, Rufus and Agnes of God, not to mention a few others. She discovered a deep contentment in keeping chickens, looking after them and watching them develop. This also made her think about her own life and brought back severed memories of her childhood. This book isn''t a ''how to'' on keeping chickens, it is a warm memoir chronicling her journey and the way in which keeping chickens led her to a fuller understanding of herself.