NEW YORK — 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.
Condé, winner in 2018 of an “alternate” Nobel Prize, died Monday night at a hospital in Apt, outside Marseille. Her longtime editor, Laurant Laffont, told The Associated Press that she had suffered from a neurological illness that impaired her vision to the point of having to dictate her final novel, “The Gospel According to the New World.” But she still enjoyed a 90th birthday celebration, in February, when she was joined by family and friends.
“She was smiling, she was joyous,” said Laffont, who otherwise remembered her as a woman of uncommon intensity and generosity. “It was a wonderful farewell, a truly great sendoff.”
Condé, who lived in Luberon, 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.”