French novelist, critic, and playwright from the French Overseas department and region of Guadeloupe. Condé is best known for her novel Ségou. Her novels explore the African diaspora that resulted from slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean. She was the youngest of eight children, her parents were among the first black instructors in Guadeloupe. Condé’s birth 11 years after her brother Guy made her the youngest of the eight children. Condé was born while her mother was 43, and her father was 63. Condé’s describes herself as “the spoiled child”, which she attributes to her parents older age, and the age-gap between her and her siblings.
In 1959 in Paris, Condé attended a rehearsal of Les Nègres/The Blacks by Jean Genêt, where she would meet the Guinean actor Mamadou Condé, whom she married in August 1959.They eventually had four children together. By November 1959 the couple’s relationship became strained, and Condé moved to the Ivory Coast, where she would teach for a year. During Condé’s returns for the holidays she became politically conscious through a group of Marxist friends. Condé’s marxist friends would influence her to move to Ghana. Between the years 1960 and 1972 she taught in Guinea, Ghana (from where she was deported in the 1960s because of politics), and Senegal.
In 1973 she returned to Paris, and taught Francophone literature at Paris universities. In 1975, she completed her M.A. and Ph.D. at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris in comparative literature, examining black stereotypes in Caribbean literature.
In 1981, Mamadou Condé died, the couple having long been separated. The following year she married Richard Philcox, the English-language translator of most of her novels.
She did not publish her first novel, Hérémakhonon until she was nearly 40 because “[she] didn’t have confidence in [herself] and did not dare present [her] writing to the outside world.” However, Condé would not reach her current prominence as a contemporary Caribbean writer until the publication of her third novel, Ségou (1984). Following the success of Ségou, in 1985 Condé was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach in the US. She became a professor of French and Francophone literature at Columbia University in New York City in 1995.
Link to Wikipedia biography