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| Maryse Condé | |
The New Academy Prize in Literature 2018 was awarded to Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé, who will travel to Stockholm for a formal event with a grand celebration on December 9. She has published some 20 novels, including I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem; Tales from the Heart: True Stories from My Childhood; Windward Heights; Victoire: My Mother's Mother; and Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?
Chair of judges Ann Pålsson praised Condé as "a grand storyteller. Her authorship belongs to world literature. In her work, she describes the ravages of colonialism and the postcolonial chaos in a language which is both precise and overwhelming. The magic, the dream and the terror is, as also love, constantly present. Fiction and reality overlap each other and people live as much in an imagined world with long and complicated traditions, as the ongoing present. Respectfully and with humor, she narrates the postcolonial insanity, disruption and abuse, but also human solidarity and warmth. The dead live in her stories closely to the living in a multitudinous world where gender, race and class are constantly turned over in new constellations."
The New Academy Prize in Literature was created earlier this year by more than 100 Swedish writers, actors, journalists and other cultural figures in response to the Swedish Academy's decision not to award a 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature in the wake of a highly publicized scandal. The New Academy will be dissolved in December.
"I am very happy and proud to be awarded this prize," Condé said. "But allow me to share it with my family, my friends and, above all, with the Guadeloupean people who will be so thrilled and touched by seeing me receive this award.... Guadeloupe is a small country, important to us who are born there, but only mentioned when there are hurricanes and earthquakes. I am happy that our country is now known for other reasons, for this literature prize which I am so happy and proud to receive."