https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/04/maryse-conde-an-english-author-can-reach-the-heart-of-a-caribbean-child

The Guadeloupe-born novelist on discovering prejudice in France, making sense of the world when you’re elderly, and the power of Wuthering Heights

Maryse Condé was born in Guadeloupe in 1937, earned her MA and PhD in comparative literature at Paris-Sorbonne University and went on to have a distinguished academic career, becoming professor emerita of French at Columbia University in New York. She has also lived in Guinea, Ghana and Mali, where she gained inspiration for her worldwide bestseller Segu. Condé was awarded the 2018 New Academy prize (the “alternative Nobel”), while her work has been acclaimed by Henry Louis Gates, Junot Díaz and Russell Banks, among others. Her latest novel, The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana, explores issues such as racism, terrorism and economic inequality. She lives in the south of France with her husband and translator, Richard Philcox.

What was the inspiration for your latest novel?
When I was a child it was easier to understand the world. Now that I’m old I don’t understand it at all, so I wanted to write about that difficulty. When you are an old writer, you tend to think all day about yourself – your parents, childhood. I decided to tell a story about the world of today, not yesterday, through two young twins, Ivan and Ivana. Another inspiration was the murder of Clarissa Jean-Philippe, a young police officer from Martinique, who was killed by Amedy Coulibaly, a terrorist from Mali, during the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris. I was upset because a black man could kill a black woman and so Césaire’s theory of négritude, which claimed that all black people are brothers and sisters, therefore, no longer had any meaning.