How can I select one of each category with a Pandas DataFrame in Python?

I have a dataframe that looks like this:

author|string
abc|hi
abc|yo
def|whats
ghi|up
ghi|dog

how can I select only one row per author? I’m at a loss.
I want to do something like this:

df.loc[unique authors].sample(n=1000)

and get something like this:

author|string
abc|hi
def|whats
ghi|up

I was thinking of converting the author column to categories, but I don’t know where to go from there.

I could just do something like this but it seems stupid.

author_list = df['author'].unique().tolist()
indexes = []
for author in author_list:
  indexes.append(df.loc[df['author'] == author].iloc[0].index)
df.iloc[indexes].sample(n=1000)

>Solution :

You can do

out = df.drop_duplicates('author')