Maryse Condé

Maryse Liliane Appoline Boucolon was born on the eleventh of February 1934 at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, the youngest of eight children of Auguste Boucolon — the founder of a small Black-owned commercial bank at Pointe-à-Pitre, the Banque Antillaise — and Jeanne Quidal Boucolon, a primary-school teacher. The Boucolon household was Black middle-class, francophone and politically conservative. She was educated at the Lycée de la Pointe-à-Pitre through her sixteenth year and was sent in 1950 to Paris for secondary completion at the Lycée Fénelon. She entered the Sorbonne for the licence in classical letters in 1953 and met at the Sorbonne the Guinean actor Mamadou Condé, whom she married in 1958.

She lived from 1959 to 1971 across Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Ghana and Senegal — twelve years across four francophone African nations — and worked through the period as a French-language teacher and as a cultural-affairs functionary at the Institut National de Recherches et d'Action Pédagogique at Conakry. The African residence produced the documentary basis of her subsequent fiction.

She returned to Paris in 1971, completed the master's at the Sorbonne in 1975 and the doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne in 1976. She joined the Sorbonne faculty as lecturer in 1980 and held subsequent professorial chairs at the University of California Berkeley, the University of Virginia and Columbia University.

Her first novel Heremakhonon of 1976 — drawing the experience of a young Caribbean intellectual returning to Africa — established her in the francophone-literary world. The two-volume historical novel Ségou of 1984 and 1985 — drawing the eighteenth-century decline of the Bambara kingdom of Ségou under successive Islamic and colonial pressures — sold over three million copies and remains the most commercially successful francophone-Caribbean novel of the twentieth century. Her novel Moi, Tituba, sorcière of 1986 — a fictional autobiography of the Black slave-woman Tituba of the 1692 Salem witch trials — won the Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme of 1986.

She was awarded the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018 — the alternative prize given in the year the regular Nobel Prize in Literature was suspended.

She died at Apt, France, on the second of April 2024, at ninety.

She is honored here as the principal francophone-Caribbean female novelist of her generation.