Segu

Maryse Condé was born at Pointe-à-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 Littéraire de la Femme in 1986 as well as Le Prix de L'Académie Française 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 'grand storyteller who belongs to world literature'. Barbara Bray (née Jacobs) was born on November 24, 1924 in Paddington, London. She died on February 25, 2010. Bray was an English translator and critic. She translated the correspondence of Gustave Flaubert, and work by leading French speaking writers of her own time including Marguerite Duras, Amin Maalouf, Julia Kristeva, Michel Quint, Jean Anouilh, Michel Tournier, Jean Genet, Alain Bosquet, Réjean Ducharme and Philippe Sollers. She received the PEN Translation Prize in 1986. She had a personal and professional relationship with the married Samuel Beckett that continued for the rest of his life, and Bray was one of the few people with whom he discussed his work. Bray suffered a stroke at the end of 2003, but despite this disability she continued to write Beckett's memoirs, Let Mortals Rejoice..., which she could not complete. Bray recorded some of her reflections about Beckett in a series of conversations with her friend, Marek Kedzierski, from 2004 to 2009. Excerpts have been published in many languages, but not English as of yet.