literature
Writer Maryse Condé dies
Maryse Condé 2018 after the awarding of the Alternative Nobel Prize on the video wall in the Stockholm City Library. photo
© Janerik Henriksson//TT NEWS AGENCY/AP/dpa
The author has received numerous awards for her works in which she critically dealt with racism.
The award-winning writer Maryse Condé is dead. The Guadeloupe-born author died at the age of 90 in a hospital in southern France on Tuesday night, the French news agency AFP learned from her husband.
Winner of the Alternative Nobel Prize for literature
Condé has received numerous awards for her works in which she critically examines racism and the fate of black people in the Caribbean. Including the 2018 prize that was awarded in Sweden as an alternative to the Nobel Prize in Literature when it was not awarded.
The writer was also known in Germany. Among other things, she published the highly acclaimed novel “I, Tituba, the Black Witch of Salem”, which is about a slave’s daughter. She created a cult work with “Segu. The Walls Made of Clay”. In it she describes the conflicts between different cultures, languages and rituals in a cruel but at the same time sensual way. The work “The Gospel of the New World,” which is about a foundling on a Caribbean island, was only published in 2023.
Important French literary voice
In France, the author, who lived in Provence in recent years, was considered an important literary voice. She was born on February 11, 1934 in Guadeloupe, according to a plaque at her birthplace in Pointe-à-Pitre, the largest city in the French overseas department of Guadeloupe.