The winner of the ‘Alternative Nobel Literature Prize’ and dubbed the ‘grande dame’ of Francophone literature, Maryse Condé, has died at the age of 90.
Guadeloupe-born French novelist, critic, and professor Maryse Condé became known by penning vividly detailed books that examined the terrible repercussions of colonialism, slavery, and diaspora, which introduced a plethora of information about African and Caribbean history to readers worldwide.
Her spouse, Richard Philcox, who translated numerous of Dr. Condé’s books into English, made her passing public, but did not provide a reason for her death.
In 1986, the writer and her husband remained in Guadeloupe because she suffered a degenerative neurological disease that impaired her speech and vision, so Dr. Conde dictated her last three books to her husband, chapter by chapter, and they have all been published since 2020.
In a year when the Swedish Academy was devastated by a sexual misconduct scandal, a group of prominent Swedish cultural figures presented an award that was billed as an alternative to the Nobel Prize in literature–which was not awarded for the first time since 1949 and named it the New Academy Prize. So Maryse Condé was the first and only recipient of the New Academy Prize in Literature. The judges of the New Academy Prize in Literature commended Condé for the way she “describes the ravages of colonialism and post-colonial chaos in a language which is both precise and overwhelming.” Aside from this literature prize, Maryse Condé was included on two shortlists for the International Booker Prize: one in 2015 for her body of work as a whole and the other in 2023 for her most recent book, “The Gospel According to the New World.”
Her title came from when she was awarded the New Academy Prize in Literature at 84 when Jury chair Ann Palsson described Dr. Condé as a “grand storyteller” who “belongs to world literature” when presenting the New Academy Prize.
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