Maryse Condé

Maryse Condé was born Maryse Boucolon on 11 February 1934 in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, the youngest of eight children, and moved to Paris at 16 to complete her education, where she became immersed in the African and Caribbean intellectual circles of the city.

Condé spent over a decade living and teaching across West Africa, including Guinea, Ghana and Senegal, an experience that profoundly shaped her understanding of the African diaspora and provided rich material for her later fiction exploring the connections between Africa and the Caribbean.

In 1984 Condé published her best-known novel, Ségou, an epic historical saga set in the West African Bambara kingdom, and in 1986 she published Moi, Tituba, sorcière, reimagining the life of a Black woman executed during the Salem witch trials and reclaiming her erased history.

Condé built an extensive academic career, becoming a professor of French literature at institutions including Columbia University, where she chaired the Center for French and Francophone Studies, while continuing to publish prolifically across novels, plays and memoirs.

In 2018 Condé was awarded the New Academy Prize in Literature, an alternative honour created the year the Nobel Prize in Literature was suspended, and she continued writing into her final years despite a degenerative illness; she died in France in April 2024 at age 90, widely mourned as one of the great voices of Caribbean literature.