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Maryse Conde Biography & Facts

Maryse Condé (née Marise Liliane Appoline Boucolon; 11 February 1934 – 2 April 2024) was a French novelist, critic, and playwright from the French Overseas department and region of Guadeloupe. She was also an academic, whose teaching career took her to West Africa and North America, as well as the Caribbean and Europe. As a writer, Condé is best known for her novel Ségou (1984–1985). Condé's writings explore the African diaspora that resulted from slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean. Her novels, written in French, have been translated into English, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese. She won various awards, such as the Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme (1986), Prix de l'Académie française (1988), Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe (1997) and the New Academy Prize in Literature (2018) for her works. She was considered a strong contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Early life Born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, on 11 February 1934, she was the youngest of eight children. Her parents were among the first black instructors in Guadeloupe. Her mother, Jeanne Quidal (who was from Marie-Galante, which island would often feature in Condé's creative writing), directed her own school for girls. Her father, Auguste Boucolon — previously an educator – founded the small bank "La Caisse Coopérative des prêts", which was later renamed "La Banque Antillaise." Condé's father, Auguste Boucolon, had two sons from his first marriage: Serge and Albert. Condé's three sisters were Ena, Jeanne, and Gillette, and her brothers were Auguste, Jean, René, and Guy. Condé was born 11 years after Guy, when her mother was 43, and her father 63. Condé described herself as "the spoiled child", which she attributed to her parents' older age, as well as the age-gap between her and her siblings. Condé began writing at an early age. Before she was 12 years old, she had written a one-act, one-person play. The play was written as a gift for her mother's birthday. After having graduated from high school, Condé attended Lycée Fénelon from 1953 to 1955, being expelled after two years of attendance. She furthered her studies at the Université de Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle) in Paris. During her attendance, along with other West Indians, Condé established the Luis-Carlos Prestes club. Career In 1958, Condé attended a rehearsal in Paris of Les Nègres/The Blacks by Jean Genet, where she met the Guinean actor Mamadou Condé. In August 1958, she married Mamadou Condé. They eventually had three children together before separating in 1969 (Condé already had one child from Haitian journalist Jean Dominique). By November 1959, the couple's relationship had already become strained, and Condé decided to go alone to the Ivory Coast, where she taught for a year in Bingerville. During her returns to Guinea for the holidays, she became politically conscious through a group of Marxist friends, who would influence her to move to Ghana. It was for her a turbulent but formative time that she would later chronicle in her 2012 book La Vie sans fards (What Is Africa to Me? Fragments of a True-to-Life Autobiography), as in the recently independent West African countries she rubbed shoulders with the likes of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Julius Nyerere and Maya Angelou. Between the years 1960 and 1972, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. While in Ghana, she edited a collection of francophone African literature, Anthologie de la literature africaine d'expression française (Ghana Institute of Languages, 1966). However, she became disillusioned with being "witness to many contradictory events", and accusations against her of suspected subversive activity resulted in Condé's deportation from Ghana. After leaving West Africa, she worked in London as a BBC producer for two years. Then in 1973, she returned to Paris and taught Francophone literature at Paris VII (Jussieu), X (Nanterre), and Ill (Sorbonne Nouvelle). In 1975, she completed her M.A. and Ph.D. at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris in comparative literature, examining black stereotypes in Caribbean literature. She was the author of works of criticism that included Le profil d'une oeuvre (Hatier, 1978), La Civilisation du Bossale (L'Harmattan, 1978), and La Parole des femmes (L'Harmattan, 1979). In 1981, she and Condé divorced, having long been separated. The following year, she married Richard Philcox, an Englishman and the English-language translator of most of her novels. She did not publish her first novel, Hérémakhonon, until she was nearly 40, as "[she] didn't have confidence in [herself] and did not dare present [her] writing to the outside world." Her second novel, Une saison à Rihata, was published in 1981; however, Condé would not reach prominence as a contemporary Caribbean writer until the publication of her third novel, Ségou (1984). Following the success of Ségou, in 1985, Condé was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the United States to teach "Literature and Culture of the Caribbean" at Occidental College, Los Angeles (September 1985–May 1986). In 1987, she was a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio writer-in-residence, and she was also awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. In 1991, her play The Hills of Massabielle was staged in New York at the Ubu Repertory Theater. She was included in the 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby. In 1995, Condé became a professor of French and Francophone literature at Columbia University in New York City, where she was subsequently professor emerita. Condé taught at various universities, including the University of California, Berkeley; UCLA, the Sorbonne, the University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. She retired from teaching in 2005. She is the subject of the 2011 documentary film Maryse Condé, une voix singulière, directed by Jérôme Sesquin, which retraces her life. In 2011, Collège Maryse-Condé on the island of La Désirade was inaugurated in her honour. Death Condé died in Apt, Vaucluse, southeastern France, on 2 April 2024, at the age of 90. Literary significance Condé's novels explore racial, gender, and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1986); the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Ségou (1984–1985); and the 20th-century building of the Panama Canal and its influence on increasing the West Indian middle class in Tree of Life (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. As Louise Hardwick observes, "Cosmopolitan in nature, Condé’s literature tackles the complexities of a globalised world in an unmistakably frank voice. She rejected attempts to pigeonhole her style, or labels describing her as a French or Creole writer," and she was often quoted as stating: "I write in Maryse Condé." Her first novel, Hérémakhonon (in the Malinke language, the title means "waiting for happiness"), was published in.... Discover the Maryse Conde popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Maryse Conde books.