Guadeloupean writer Maryse Conde dies aged 90 — Husband
MARSEILLE: Guadeloupean writer Maryse Conde, one of the French-speaking world’s most renowned authors, has died aged 90, her husband told AFP on Tuesday.
Conde died in her sleep at hospital in the town of Apt in southeastern France on Monday night, her husband Richard Philcox said.
She was known as one of the greatest chroniclers of the struggles and triumphs of the descendants of Africans taken as slaves to the Caribbean.
Often tipped for the Nobel Prize for Literature, “the grand storyteller” from the French Caribbean territory of Guadeloupe won the alternative Swedish New Academy prize in 2018.
Born in Pointe-a-Pitre on February 11, 1934, Conde tackled racism, sexism and a multitude of black identities, and was also one of the first to call out the corruption of newly independent African states.
She also taught in the United States for many years.
Her first book “Heremakhonon”, which means “Waiting for Happiness” in the west African Malinke language, caused a scandal in 1976 and was pulped.
Conde “describes the ravages of colonialism and post-colonial chaos in a language which is both precise and overwhelming”, the New Academy said in 2018.
“I’m very happy and proud of this prize,” Conde said at the time. Guadeloupe, an overseas part of France, is “only mentioned when there are hurricanes or earthquakes”, she said.
Conde, who suffered from a neurodegenerative disease, lived in the village of Gordes in southeastern France, to where she moved with her husband in the 1980s.
It was there that she dictated her last book to a friend, “L’Evangile du nouveau monde”, her rewriting of the New Testament. — AFP