By Ian Youngs\BBC
Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
Guadeloupe-born author Maryse Condé, who was renowned for epic novels tackling the legacy of slavery and colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean, has died at the age of 90.
One of the most celebrated voices in the French-speaking world, Condé’s works included 1984’s Segu and 1986’s I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem.
She also wrote plays and non-fiction.
In 2018, she won an award set up in place of the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was engulfed in scandal.
Condé was the first and remains the only winner of the New Academy Prize in Literature, whose judges praised the way she “describes the ravages of colonialism and post-colonial chaos in a language which is both precise and overwhelming”.
She wanted to be a writer since she read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as a child, but didn’t publish her first novel until she was in her 40s.
That book was 1976’s Heremakhonon, which means “waiting for happiness” in the the west African Malinke language. It followed a woman from the Caribbean who lived and taught in Paris, and who travelled to Africa to trace her identity. READ MORE
