[News Figures] 86-Year-Old Mariz Konde Nominated for Booker International Prize

Raised in a Wealthy Family, Educated in Paris
Colonized and Black Women Grapple with Identity
Novel Published About Searching Black Roots from 30s
If Awarded, Becomes Oldest Winner in History

French female novelist Maryse Cond? has been longlisted for this year's Booker International Prize. Born in a French colony, she grew up in a wealthy family and received higher education, but after witnessing the colonial reality and the harsh lives of Black women in mainland France, she mainly wrote novels exploring Black identity.

Cond? was born in 1937 on the French territory of Guadeloupe Island, Pointe-?-Pitre, as the youngest of eight siblings between a banker father and a mother who was the first Black female teacher. She spent her childhood in relative affluence and was strongly influenced by mainland French culture. However, according to her 1999 memoir <_울고 웃는 마음_> (The Heart That Cries and Laughs), published when she was 62, she left her family at 16 to study in France, where she faced new struggles different from the life she had enjoyed in Guadeloupe. She seriously contemplated her identity amid the realities faced by the colonial motherland, the class and racial disparities among Black people, and the political currents within the Black student community she encountered among white students during her early university years in France.

Novelist Maryse Cond?. Photo by Wikipedia

The island where she was born is also a small Caribbean island, home to many descendants of people brought from Africa through the slave trade. During this period, Cond? is known to have deeply reflected on the years and realities she experienced as a Black woman and a colonized person. This autobiographical essay received the Marguerite Yourcenar Literary Prize upon its publication in 1999. The Marguerite Yourcenar Literary Prize was established in 1982 by the French Librarians Association to honor Marguerite Yourcenar, a Belgian-born French novelist and the first female member of the Acad?mie Fran?aise.

After marrying Mamadou Cond?, an actor from Guinea, in 1958, Cond? moved to C?te d'Ivoire in Africa and worked as a French language teacher. After living for over ten years moving between Guinea, Ghana, and Senegal, she returned to France in 1973 and earned a doctorate in comparative literature from Paris III University. During this period, she divorced and remarried in 1981 to the translator of the English edition of her book. She then taught Francophone literature at Paris X University, UC Berkeley, University of Maryland, University of Virginia, Harvard University, and Columbia University until 2005.

She published her first novel at age 35 in 1972 and began her career as a novelist with works such as her representative novel <_Segou_>, the Women's Literature Award-winning <_I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem_>, and the Ana?s-S?galas Literary Prize-winning <_The Evil Life_> awarded by the Acad?mie Fran?aise.

Early in her writing career, she wrote plays, but starting with <_Ereba Konong_> (1976), which tells the story of a young Black woman educated in Paris searching for her roots in Africa, she began publishing novels. She was awarded the Legion of Honour Officer in 2014, and gained global recognition again by receiving the New Academy Prize for Literature, an alternative Nobel Prize, in 2018, and the Chino Del Duca International Prize in 2021. Her novels and numerous essays have been translated and published in multiple languages including English, Spanish, German, and Japanese.

Cond? holds a different philosophy from other Caribbean-born writers who have called for reclaiming African cultural values. She emphasizes that the Caribbean has its own unique culture and that their identity should be found here, not elsewhere.

Her Booker International Prize-nominated book <_The Gospel of the New World_> is such a work. The judging panel praised it as "borrowing from the tradition of magical realism to lead us into a world full of color and vitality," and described it as "a book that successfully blends humor, poetry, depth, and lightness." At 86 years old this year, if she wins, Cond? will become the oldest recipient in this category, surpassing Ismail Kadare, who was 69 in 2005.

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