Her mother, Jeanne Quidal (who was from Marie-Galante, which island would often feature in Condé's creative writing),[10] directed her own school for girls.

Fragments of a True-to-Life Autobiography), as in the recently independent West African countries she rubbed shoulders with the likes of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Julius Nyerere and Maya Angelou.

[13] However, she became disillusioned with being "witness to many contradictory events", and accusations against her of suspected subversive activity resulted in Condé's deportation from Ghana.

[6] Following the success of Ségou, in 1985, Condé was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the United States to teach "Literature and Culture of the Caribbean" at Occidental College, Los Angeles (September 1985–May 1986).

[6] She is the subject of the 2011 documentary film Maryse Condé, une voix singulière, directed by Jérôme Sesquin, which retraces her life.

[25][26] Condé's novels explore racial, gender, and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1986); the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Ségou (1984–1985); and the 20th-century building of the Panama Canal and its influence on increasing the West Indian middle class in Tree of Life (1987).

[5] As Louise Hardwick observes, "Cosmopolitan in nature, Condé’s literature tackles the complexities of a globalised world in an unmistakably frank voice.

She rejected attempts to pigeonhole her style, or labels describing her as a French or Creole writer,"[27] and she was often quoted as stating: "I write in Maryse Condé.

[32] The book is the story, as she described it, of an "'anti-moi', an ambiguous persona whose search for identity and origins is characterized by a rebellious form of sexual libertinage".

[32] Condé kept considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Négritude and Creolité, and often focused on topics with strong feminist and political concerns.

[34] Who Slashed Celanire's Throat (2000) was inspired by a true story and uses a blend of magical realism and fantasy in a novel about a woman who wants to uncover the truth of her past and avenge her childhood mutilation.

Fragments of a True-to-Life Autobiography was described by Noo Saro-Wiwa in a review for The Times Literary Supplement as "refreshingly frank ... an entertaining and occasionally humorous account of the twelve years the author spent in Africa during the late 1950s and 60s.

... and by the book's end the author concedes that she still doesn't know what Africa means to her – a brave admission in a world that hankers for defined narrative arcs.

"[38] In 2022, she was honoured as one of 12 Royal Society of Literature International Writers, alongside Anne Carson, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Cornelia Funke, Mary Gaitskill, Faïza Guène, Saidiya Hartman, Kim Hyesoon, Yōko Ogawa, Raja Shehadeh, Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Samar Yazbek.

[41] The creation of the novel was by means of dictation to her husband and translator Richard Philcox, as she had a degenerative neurological disorder that made it difficult to speak and see.