Author Maryse Condé is dead

Maryse Condé was born on February 11 as Maryse Boucolon Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. According to some sources she was born in 1937 and according to others in 1934.

She passed away on the night between Monday, April 1 and Tuesday, April 2, writes Le Monde.

At 16, Maryse Condé moved to Paris to study. She married the Guinean actor Mamadou Condé in 1959 and lived in several countries in Africa, including Guinea, Ghana, Senegal and the Ivory Coast, where she worked as a teacher.

The couple had four children and divorced in the late 60s. Maryse Condé married the British translator Richard Philcox in 1982.

Received an alternative Nobel Prize

Condé has written around 20 novels and has received several awards, including the one awarded by the “New Academy” in 2018.

The prize was awarded as a reaction to the failure of the Nobel Prize in Literature in the same year due to the crisis in the Swedish Academy and was voted for by librarians and the public. The initiator was Alexandra Pascalidou.

Hit in the 80s

Maryse Condé has taught at Columbia University in New York and her literature often revolves around how colonialism changed, and still today shapes, the world. She debuted in 1976 with the novel Hérémakhonon, which critically depicts corruption in post-colonial Africa.

She had her big breakthrough with the family chronicle “Segu: Walls of clay” which was published in 1985, writes The National Encyclopedia. The book depicts an animist society in what is now Mali, in the 19th century.

Her last book was the “New World Gospel”, which was published in Swedish in 2022.