Maryse Condé, 2008
Maryse Condé (Pointe-a-Pitre on Guadeloupe, February 11, 1937) is a French writer from the Caribbean Guadeloupe. Life and work
Condé was born the youngest in a family with 8 children. Already during her school time, she was attracted to literature, especially the English. In 1953 she went to Paris to study comparative literature at the Sorbonne. She graduated with a dissertation on the stereotyping of blacks in West Indian literature.
In 1958 Condé married an actor, then received four children and worked in various West African countries as a teacher and speech institute, including in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In Mali she inspired her worldwide bestseller Segou; The earthquakes fell from 1984, followed in 1985 by Segou; the crumbled earth, for which she received the African LiBatuur Award in 1987. The Segou epic describes the history of the destruction of the Bambara empire in the present Mali in the nineteenth century, linking this to the tragedy of individual human beings.
Since 1980, Condé performed at various Western European universities (including the Sorbonne) Afrikaans Literature and from 1985, until 2004, she then taught French-Afrikaans literature at Columbia University in New York. With her second husband, the translator Richard Philcox, she now lives alternately in New York and Guadeloupe.
Condé is known as a strong advocate of Panafricanism.
Many of Condé's work was also translated into Dutch. Bibliography
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