Condé's novels explore racial, gender, and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the
Salem witch trials in
I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1986); the 19th-century
Bambara Empire of
Mali in
Ségou (1984–1985); and the 20th-century building of the
Panama Canal and its influence on increasing the West Indian middle class in
Tree of Life (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. and she was often quoted as stating: "I write in Maryse Condé." Her first novel,
Hérémakhonon (in the
Malinke language, the title means "waiting for happiness"), was published in 1976. While the story closely parallels Condé's own life during her first stay in Guinea, and is written as a first-person narrative, she stressed that it is not an autobiography. The book is the story, as she described it, of an anti-moi', an ambiguous persona whose search for identity and origins is characterized by a rebellious form of sexual libertinage". and
Victoire (2006), a
fictional biography of her maternal grandmother during a period when the black population of Guadeloupe asserted their rights to education and political power. ''Who Slashed Celanire's Throat'' (2000) was inspired by a true story and uses a blend of
magical realism and
fantasy in a novel about a woman who wants to uncover the truth of her past and avenge her childhood mutilation. The 2017 translation by Richard Philcox of Condé's
What Is Africa to Me? Fragments of a True-to-Life Autobiography was described by
Noo Saro-Wiwa in a review for
The Times Literary Supplement as "refreshingly frank ... an entertaining and occasionally humorous account of the twelve years the author spent in Africa during the late 1950s and 60s. ... and by the book's end the author concedes that she still doesn't know what Africa means to her – a brave admission in a world that hankers for defined narrative arcs." In 2018, Condé was awarded the
New Academy Prize in Literature, established as a one-off alternative to the
Nobel Prize in Literature (for which she was often considered a favourite but which was not awarded that year, as a consequence of a sexual abuse scandal among the award committee), with the jury praising Condé as a "grand storyteller whose authorship belongs to world literature, describing the ravages of colonialism and the postcolonial chaos in a language which is both precise and overwhelming." In 2022, she was honoured as one of 12
Royal Society of Literature International Writers, alongside
Anne Carson,
Tsitsi Dangarembga,
Cornelia Funke,
Mary Gaitskill,
Faïza Guène,
Saidiya Hartman,
Kim Hyesoon,
Yōko Ogawa,
Raja Shehadeh,
Juan Gabriel Vásquez and
Samar Yazbek. Condé's 2023 novel,
The Gospel According to the New World, was longlisted for the
International Booker Prize and, at the age of 86, she was the oldest writer ever to be longlisted for the prize. The creation of the novel was by means of dictation to her husband and translator Richard Philcox, as she had a degenerative neurological disorder that made it difficult to speak and see. Together, they were the first wife-and-husband author-translator team to be longlisted, and subsequently shortlisted, for the award.
Archives Maryse Condé's literary archives (Maryse Condé papers, 1979–2012) are held at
Columbia University Libraries. ==Selected bibliography==