A great voice in French-speaking literature, Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé died in the night from Monday to Tuesday at Apt hospital (Vaucluse), where she passed away in her sleep, her husband told AFP. husband, Richard Philcox.
Born in Pointe-à-Pitre on February 11, 1934, Maryse Condé has addressed Africa, slavery and multiple black identities in around thirty books. She was also very well known in the United States, where she lived for twenty years in New York and opened and directed a center for French-speaking studies at Columbia University.
“I always worked with her in her different publishing houses, and I deeply admired her influence, her courage. She made a lot of writers want to take the plunge and fight with her” , reacted to AFP its editor, Laurent Laffont.
It was only at the age of 42, after twelve years of life and trials, in Africa and thanks to her new companion, Richard Philcox, who would become her translator, that she began to write. In 1976, she published “Hérémakhonon”, then “Ségou” (1984-1985), a bestseller on the Bambara empire in 19th century Mali.
She is also the author of “Desiderada” and her name has been cited several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
“Maryse was first my teacher. Then, we found each other a few years later, in Guadeloupe,” Christiane Taubira testified during two days of meetings and readings organized around the writer at the Museum of Civilizations in Europe and the Mediterranean (Mucem) in Marseille in November 2022.
“It’s a friendship that was nourished by meetings in Paris, in Guyana,” added the Guyanese politician.
Maryse Condé lived in Gordes, a small Provençal village in Vaucluse, in the south of France. Suffering from a neurodegenerative disease, she settled there with her husband in the 1980s. It was there that she dictated her latest book to a friend, “The Gospel of the New World”, her rewriting of the New Will.
