Maryse Condé, activist, academic and extraordinary storyteller’, dies at 90

Maryse Condé, the Guadeloupean author of more than 20 novels, activist, academic and sole winner of the New Academy prize in literature, has died aged 90.

- Sian Cain

Condé, whose books include Segu and Hérémakhonon, was seen as a literary giant of the West Indies, writing frankly - as both a novelist and essayist of colonialism, sexuality and the black diaspora, and introducing readers round the world to a wealth of African and Caribbean history.

Writing about the "unputdownable and unforgettable" epic Segu, the Booker winner Bernardine Evaristo praised Condé as "an extraordinary storyteller", while the author Justin Torres wrote: "One is never on steady ground with Condé; she is not an ideologue, and hers is not the kind of liberal, safe, down-the-line morality that leaves the reader unimplicated." Alain Mabanckou, the awardwinning Congolese writer and a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, wrote on X that Condé was the "grande dame of world letters" and had bequeathed a body of work "driven by the quest for a humanism based on the ramifications of our identities and the fractures in history".

Born Maryse Boucolon in Guadeloupe in 1934, the youngest of eight children, Condé described herself as a "spoilt child... oblivious to the outside world". Her parents, she told the Guardian, never taught her about slavery and "were convinced France was the best place in the world".