'Alternative Nobel Literature Prize' Winner Author Maryse Cond? Passes Away

Representative Writer of Postcolonial Literature
From French Guadeloupe

Marie Cond?, a writer from French Guadeloupe who led postcolonial literature, passed away on the 1st (local time) at the age of 90.

Cond?'s husband told AFP that she died in her sleep at a hospital in Apt, southeastern France, on that day.

Novelist Maryse Cond?. Photo by Wikipedia

Born in 1934, Cond? began her serious novel writing career in 1976 with "Waiting for Happiness (Eremakono)." This novel tells the story of a black woman educated in Paris who seeks her roots in Africa.

She continued to publish works dealing with racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and various black identities experienced by descendants of Africans enslaved in the Caribbean region. Representative works include "I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem," which depicts the life of a black slave accused of witchcraft during the 17th-century American Puritan era, and "Segu," which portrays the fall of the Segu Bambara Kingdom in 18th-century West Africa.

"The Heart That Cries and Laughs" was introduced in Korea in 2021. It is an autobiographical essay reflecting on childhood spent as the weakest in the food chain: a colonized subject, black, and female.

In 2018, Cond? won the New Academy Prize in Literature, known as an alternative Nobel Prize, for her work "Segu." The New Academy was established by about 100 Swedish writers, actors, and journalists after the Swedish Academy, the institution that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, canceled the prize that year due to the "Me Too" controversy.

She was later nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Booker Prize but did not win.