PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Maryse Conde was born at Pointe- -Pitre, Guadeloupe, in 1937 and spent most of her life in West Africa (Guinea, Ghana and Senegal), France and the US, where she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA and Columbia. The publication of her bestselling third novel, Segu (1984), established her pre-eminent position among Caribbean writers. She won Le Grand Prix Litteraire de la Femme in 1986 as well as Le Prix de L'Academie Fran aise in 1988 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015. In 2018 she was awarded the alternative Nobel prize for literature and described as a 'grand storyteller who belongs to world literature'.
The grand queen, the empress, of Caribbean literature -- Fiammetta Rocco * Guardian * Maryse Conde's prodigious fictional universes are founded on a radical and generative disregard for boundaries based on geography, religion, history, race, and gender -- Angela Y. Davis A story of life in all its flavours . . . a fluid, mobile narrative, passing easily from person to person. Fascinating and beautiful -- John Self * The Observer * A masterly storyteller * New York Times Book Review * A treasure of world literature, writing from the center of the African diaspora with brilliance and a profound understanding of all humanity -- Russell Banks Conde writes elegantly in a style that beautifully survives translation from the French. . . She gives readers a flavor of the French and Creole stew that is the Guadeloupan tongue. In so doing, Conde conveys the many subtle distinctions of color, class, and language that made up this society * Chicago Tribune *
