Maryse Condé

Born on the island of Guadeloupe in the French Antilles, Maryse Condé has been awarded numerous awards for her many books and plays. She attracted international attention with her best seller Segu which has been translated into over fifteen languages. After having spent twelve years in Africa, working as a teacher in Sénégal, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, she received her PhD in comparative literature from the Sorbonne and left for the United States to become tenured professor at some of the most prestigious universities such as UC Berkeley, Virginia, Harvard and Columbia where she created the Center for Francophone Studies and was appointed Professor Emeritus. Between 2004 and 2008 she was President of the Committee for the Memory of Slavery resulting from the French law acting slavery as a crime against humanity and was promoted Officer of the Legion d’Honneur in 2015. She was awarded the Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme for I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and the Prix Marguerite Yourcenar for Tales from the Heart: True Stories from My Childhood. Her last book to be translated into English is What is Africa to Me? published by Seagull Books in 2017. She was short-listed in 2015 for the Man Booker International Prize in London and now lives in Gordes in the South of France.