Antillean writer Maryse Condé dies

Photo Credit To Agencia EFE

The Antillean writer Maryse Condé (Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe), known for her activism against slavery and racism, died at the age of 87 (90 years old according to other biographical sources), according to her publisher in social networks. Spanish, Impedimenta.

“It is with great sadness that we announce the death of our beloved Maryse Condé. She leaves behind an absolutely masterful work, which has always excited us and which has been one of the backbones of the publishing house,” said Impedimenta, who places her date of birth in 1937 (although French media establish it as 1934).

When he was sixteen years old, he went to Paris to study at the Fénelon high school. There she would meet Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor whom she married in 1959 and whom she would divorce to marry Richard Philcox, the English translator of most of her work.

She worked as a French teacher in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal, until she returned to France in 1970.

Five years later he earned a doctorate in Comparative Literature. In 1976 she published his first novel, Hérémakhonon, which would mark the beginning of a prolific literary career.

In 1987 she received her first literary award, the Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme, for her second novel: ‘I, Tituba, the black witch of Salem’ (1986). Her works also include the series ‘Segu’ (1985); ‘La Migration des coeurs’ (1995, an Antillean rewriting of Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë); ‘The desired’; ‘Heart that laughs, heart that cries’ (1999) and ‘Life without makeup’ (2012; Impedimenta, 2020).

In 1985 he received a Fulbright scholarship to teach in the United States. She also participated in the creation of the Insular Americas and Guyana Award, which annually recognizes the best book on the Caribbean scene.

In 2018 he was awarded the Alternative Nobel Prize for Literature, for portraying in his work “the ravages of colonialism and postcolonial chaos with precise and, at the same time, devastating language.” Currently he lived in a village in French Provence.