The author Maryse Condé, who has died aged 90 after a long-term neurological illness, wrote uncompromisingly and often provocatively about race, gender, colonialism and their intersections. Her career as a writer and academic spanned five decades, and developed between her native Caribbean, and Europe, west Africa and North America.
Cosmopolitan in nature, Condé’s literature tackles the complexities of a globalised world in an unmistakably frank voice. She rejected attempts to pigeonhole her style, or labels describing her as a French or Creole writer, stating: “I write in Maryse Condé.”
After coming to prominence through early novels set in Africa, including her international breakthrough, Segu (1984), she took inspiration from Arthur Miller in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1986), written in part to purge the trauma of the racism she had experienced as a Black woman in a mixed-race relationship in America. Condé also reimagined Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as Windward Heights (published in 1995 as La Migration des Coeurs, and the translation in 1998), transposing the action to Cuba and her native Guadeloupe.
The settings of her novels, like Condé herself, criss-crossed the globe. She tracked the fortunes, and more often misfortunes, of families – and particularly women – across continents and generations in The Tree of Life (1987) and Desirada (1997). Later novels such as The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana (2017) explored inequality through the lens of migration.
She was born into a distinguished family in the town of Pointe-à-Pitre, when Guadeloupe, a group of islands in the southern Caribbean, was a French colony. As she related in her memoir of childhood, Tales from the Heart (1999), her mother, Jeanne (nee Quidal), was a schoolteacher, while her father, Auguste Boucolon, moved from education into finance. Maryse found her parents’ constructed bourgeois world to be one of contradictions, class paranoia and racial alienation.
Isolated by her position as the youngest – by 11 years – of the couple’s eight children, she came to revel in and cultivate her status as an outsider. Writing became her preferred mode of rebellion – mostly novels, but also short stories, plays and children’s literature.
In her early 20s, while studying English at the Sorbonne in Paris, she became pregnant by a Haitian student, the agronomist Jean Dominique. He immediately abandoned her to return to Haiti, leaving her a single mother to their son, Denis.
She then met the Guinean actor Mamadou Condé, whom she married in 1958. Following him to west Africa, she held teaching posts in the heady era of independence, and the couple had three daughters. Although the marriage quickly fell apart (after a long separation, they divorced in 1981), she was to retain his name throughout her career.
Her decision to move to Africa was also influenced by the Négritude movement, which promoted a universal Black culture rooted in Africa. Yet as indicated by the title of Condé’s first novel, Heremakhonon (1976) – a Malinke word which means “waiting for happiness” – the decade or so spent in west Africa was marked by thwarted expectations. Concepts of identity and belonging were, she realised, more complex.
Instead, happiness was to arrive through the chance encounter in Senegal with a British translator, Richard Philcox. They married in 1982 and Philcox became her translator, forging an extraordinarily supportive relationship, one of the most formidable literary partnerships of recent times.
The couple lived a peripatetic existence. In London, Condé worked at the BBC on programmes about Black culture; in Paris, she promoted Black literature at the publishing house Présence Africaine. As she established herself as the grande dame of Caribbean literature, they lived between the US, Guadeloupe and France, where Condé’s final years were spent.
Condé had begun her literary career in her early 40s, when she had four children. Characters struggling to reconcile motherhood with their own sense of identity permeate her work, and she reflected directly on her own experiences, and on Denis’s homosexuality and premature death in 1997 from Aids, in What is Africa to Me? (2012).
Earning a doctorate in comparative literature from the Sorbonne in 1975, Condé also enjoyed a distinguished academic career, publishing ground-breaking studies on Négritude (1978) and Francophone women’s writing (1979). A Fulbright award led her to relocate to the US, and in 1995 she became a professor at Columbia University in New York.
Her international reputation now cemented, Condé was appointed by the French president Jacques Chirac as the inaugural president of the Committee for the Memory of Slavery, set up after the passing of the 2001 Taubira law, which recognised slavery as a crime against humanity, and with a cultural and educational remit to deepen the understanding and commemoration of enslavement.
Condé was twice shortlisted for the International Booker prize for writing in languages other than English, including for her final novel, The Gospel According to the New World (2023), dictated to her husband as the progressive neurological disease that severely affected her mobility for two decades caused her eyesight to fail.
In 2018, when the Nobel prize in literature was cancelled due to sexual abuse allegations, she was awarded the New Academy prize in literature, the “alternative Nobel”, a dazzling achievement that she chose to share with the people of Guadeloupe in a much-fêted return to her native land. Her island was always with her, as poignantly expressed in her culinary memoir Of Morsels and Marvels (2015).
I first met Condé in 2005. The interest and encouragement she showed me, a state-educated, first-generation university graduate then pursuing a doctorate, was wholly unexpected, and had a profound impact. She will be remembered chiefly for her literary brilliance, but also as a generous mentor to a younger generation of authors and researchers.
Condé is survived by Richard, her daughters, Sylvie, Aïcha and Leïla, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
• Maryse Liliane Appoline Condé, author and academic, born 11 February 1934; died 2 April 2024
