Maryse Condé is dead: winner of the “New Literature Prize” 2018

Enlarge image

Writer Condé: From a country that “is only mentioned when there are hurricanes or earthquakes”

Photo: Arnold Jerocki / Getty Images

The writer Maryse Condé has received numerous awards for her literary work. In Germany, in 1988, she was the first winner of the Literature Prize, which aims to draw particular attention to women authors from the Global South (and hit the headlines in 2023 when the award was postponed to Adania Shibli). In France she received an award from the Académie française. But the greatest international attention came to her in the context of a scandal in the Nobel Prize committee - which of course she herself could not help.

Because a man close to the Swedish Academy was accused of sexual harassment (and later went to prison for rape), it was decided in 2018 not to award the Nobel Prize for Literature. Time must be invested "to restore public trust in the Academy before the next winner can be announced," explained the interim chairman.

A so-called “New Academy”, formed by a few Swedish cultural workers, stepped into the breach and awarded an alternative international literary prize. First, Swedish librarians compiled a list of authors, from which almost 33,000 people from all over the world chose four candidates. A jury then chose Maryse Condé. The unique award was endowed with prize money of one million Swedish crowns (97,000 euros). The “real” 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, worth nine million crowns, was subsequently awarded to the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk in 2019 following a reshuffle at the Swedish Academy.

Maryse Condé was born in 1937 in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. At the age of 16 she went to Paris to study and later lived in West Africa for several years. She taught, among other things, at the Sorbonne and was professor of French language and literature at Columbia University in New York.

Maryse Condé became known as a writer through the family saga “Segu,” in which she tells the story of the West African Traoré family. Condé's literary work includes plays, novels, novellas and short stories as well as children's books and numerous reviews and articles on political and literary issues in Africa and the Caribbean. She has also published several anthologies on Francophone Caribbean literature and various theoretical writings. Colonialism and postcolonialism are the main themes of her work. In 2020, Luchterhand Verlag published her autobiography “The Unvarnished Life” in a German translation.

In her work, Condé describes in "precise language" the "devastation of colonialism and the chaos after decolonization," the New Academy explained, which is why it awarded its alternative Nobel Prize to the writer from the French overseas department of Guadeloupe. Condé said he was “very happy” about the award in a video message. She wanted to share the prize with “my family, my friends and, above all, with all the people of Guadeloupe,” she said. The country is otherwise “only mentioned when there are hurricanes or earthquakes,” she added.

On Tuesday, French newspapers such as Le Monde and Libération reported the death of Maryse Condé. She died on the night of April 1st to 2nd at the age of 90 in a hospital in Apt in the French Vaucluse department, it says, referring to a message from her husband to the AFP news agency.

Feb