Maryse Condé, prolific 'Grande Dame' of Caribbean literature, dead at age 90
A prize-winning author from Guadeloupe who was known as the ‘Grande Dame' of Caribbean literature has died
NEW YORK (AP) — Maryse Condé, an acclaimed French-language novelist from Guadeloupe who in novels, stories, plays and memoirs imagined and redefined the personal and historical past from 17th century New England to contemporary Europe, has died at age 90.
The death of Condé, winner in 2018 of an “alternate” Nobel Prize, was announced by publisher Buchet Chastel. Additional details were not immediately available.
Condé, who lived in France in recent years, was often called the “Grande Dame” of Caribbean literature. Influenced by Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and other critics of colonialism, she was a world traveler who probed the conflicts between and within Western culture, African culture and Caribbean culture, and the tensions between the desire for liberation and what the author would call “the trap of terrorism and simplistic radicalisation.”
With her husband, Richard Philcox, often serving as her English-language translator, Condé wrote dozens of books, ranging from historical explorations such as “Segu,” her best known novel, to the autobiographical stories in “Tales from the Heart” to fresh takes on Western literature. She reworked “Wuthering Heights” into “Windward Heights,” and paired a West Indian slave with Hester Prynne of “The Scarlet Letter” in ”I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.”
