Literature: Conde Awarded New Academy Prize

Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé won The New Academy Prize in Literature, a new prize established by a group of over 100 Swedish cultural figures as a substitute for this year’s Nobel in Literature, which was not awarded for the first time since 1949 because of a sexual misconduct scandal.

The New Academy Prize is accompanied by one million kronor, or around $112,000. The Nobel prizewinner would have received nine million kronor from the Swedish Academy, which intends to award the prize next year.

Ms. Condé is the author of “I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem,” a historical novel about a black woman condemned during the Salem witch trials; “Segu,” set in 18th-century West Africa; “Windward Heights,” a Caribbean reimagining of “Wuthering Heights”; and other emotionally complex novels that reach across history and cultures.

“It is impossible to read her novels and not come away from them with both a sadder and more exhilarating understanding of the human heart, in all its secret intricacies, its contradictions and marvels,” Howard Frank Mosher wrote in his review of “I, Tituba” for The New York Times in 1992.