Maryse Condé, a French-language author from Guadeloupe who became known as the grande dame of Caribbean literature while writing exuberant, lushly descriptive novels that explored the brutal legacies of slavery and colonialism, died the night of April 1 at a hospital in Apt, in southern France. She was 90.

Her death was announced by her husband, Richard Philcox, who translated many of Dr. Condé’s books into English. He did not cite a cause, and it was unclear if Dr. Condé died late Monday night or early Tuesday morning.

In recent years she had lived in the French village of Gordes, near Avignon, and suffered from a degenerative neurological disorder that made it difficult for her to speak and see, leading her to dictate her last two books to her husband.

A literary chronicler of the Black diaspora, Dr. Condé wrote richly textured novels that were dense with detail, drawn in part from her years living in West Africa, Europe, the United States and, above all, the Caribbean. Much of her work gave voice to the people and history of Guadeloupe, an overseas department of France that she described as “a small island with no say on international issues” — the sort of place that gets “mentioned only when there is a hurricane.”

Dr. Condé, who had a doctorate in comparative literature and was a professor emerita of French at Columbia University, wrote more than two-dozen books, including plays, essay collections, children’s books and memoirs, in which she recounted her childhood in Guadeloupe (she was the youngest of eight children) and her passion for cooking, which began as an act of defiance against a mother who insisted that “only stupid people like to cook.”

But she remained best known for her novels, including “Segu” (1984), a family saga set in 19th-century West Africa; “I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem” (1986), about an enslaved biracial woman accused of witchcraft (the book included a cameo from Hester Prynne, the protagonist of “The Scarlet Letter”); and “Windward Heights” (1995), a reworking of “Wuthering Heights,” the book that inspired Dr. Condé to become a novelist, with a setting transferred from the Yorkshire moors to the islands of Cuba and Guadeloupe.

“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,” author Howard Frank Mosher wrote in 1992, reviewing “I, Tituba” and another multigenerational Condé novel, “Tree of Life,” for the New York Times.

Dr. Condé had a burst of late-in-life fame at 84, when she received the 2018 New Academy Prize in Literature. Bestowed by a group of Swedish cultural figures, the award was described as an alternative to the Nobel, during a year in which the Nobel Prize in literature was not awarded because of a sexual misconduct scandal that had roiled the Swedish Academy.

In handing out the New Academy Prize, jury chair Ann Palsson called Dr. Condé a “grand storyteller” who “belongs to world literature,” adding that “she describes the ravages of colonialism and the post-colonial chaos in a language which is both precise and overwhelming.”

Dr. Condé, who once declared that the French language “was forged for me alone,” evoked a powerful sense of place in her novels. She transported readers to the cemeteries of Guadeloupe in “Tree of Life” — she called the graveyards “cities of the dead, where the filau, the beautiful beefwood tree, keeps weeping watch over the departed” — and the busy streets of London in “Segu,” where the luxury stores of the Strand give way to “hovels filled with human wrecks sleeping and copulating on heaps of straw or rags crawling with vermin.”

In “Segu,” her breakout third novel, she told a story that was at once intimate and sprawling, jumping between dozens of characters while examining a period in which Islam and the slave trade spread across West Africa. Translated into English by Barbara Bray, the novel centered on the four sons of Dousika Traore, an aristocrat in the Bambara Empire (located in present-day Mali), and examined issues of race, class and religion, as well as more transcendental questions of death and the afterlife.

“Dousika’s soul had left his body,” Dr. Condé wrote in one passage, offering an elegy for the book’s patriarch. “Every soul, airy and invisible to human eyes, enjoyed a few brief moments of liberty before being recovered by the fetish priests and assigned to its new home in the body of a newborn child. During that interval it floated above rivers, soared over hills, breathed in without a tremor the thick mist that rose from the marshes, and alighted in the most secret corners of compounds. Distance meant nothing to it. For it, the great checkerboard of the fields was but a dot in measureless space. It steered itself by the stars.”

By most accounts, she was born Marise Liliane Appoline Boucolon in Pointe-à-Pitre, the economic center of Guadeloupe, on Feb. 11, 1934. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a banker. Her parents privileged the French language over Creole and taught her to embrace France as “the Mother Country,” avoiding discussions of race and colonialism and sending her to high school in Paris.

Growing up, she said, she was “oblivious to the outside world.” That began to change after she read Joseph Zobel’s semi-autobiographical novel “Black Shack Alley” (1950), about an impoverished boy named José who lives near a White-owned sugar-cane plantation in Martinique.

“Reading Joseph Zobel, more than any theoretical discourse, opened my eyes,” she wrote in the memoir “Tales From the Heart” (1998). “I understood then that the milieu I belonged to had absolutely nothing to offer and I began to loathe it. I had become bleached and whitewashed, and because of it, a poor imitation of the little French children I hung out with.”

She studied English at the Sorbonne, and in 1958 she married Guinean actor Mamadou Condé. They moved to West Africa, where she lived for more than a decade, teaching French in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal and mixing with left-wing activists and leaders, including a visiting Che Guevara and Malcolm X.

Returning to France, she completed her doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne in 1975. The next year, she published her debut novel, “Hérémakhonon,” inspired by her years in West Africa and her disillusionment with the region’s first generation of post-independence leaders, including Guinean President Ahmed Sékou Touré, who ruled as a dictator.

Interviewed by francophone scholar Françoise Pfaff in 1982, Dr. Condé said that she took the novel’s title, a Malinke word translated as “waiting for happiness,” from the name of a department store in Guinea. “In theory, this store offered everything people needed, but it had nothing except Chinese toys of poor quality. For me it was a symbol of independence.”

The novel “Segu” established her literary bona fides, becoming a bestseller and leading to a sequel, “The Children of Segu” (1985). Dr. Condé was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach in the United States, and went on to join the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland before coming to Columbia in 1995.

She became the founding chair of Columbia’s Center for French and Francophone Studies and retired from teaching in 2005, shortly after she was appointed by French President Jacques Chirac to chair the country’s National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery.

“In France, it took a long time for slavery to be recognized as a crime against humanity,” she told the Guardian in 2020. “In the 18th century, some scientists still supported slavery and claimed that Black people were inferior and closer to animals and we are still fighting that misunderstanding. It is not easy. We shall overcome. But it will take a long time. I’m an optimist, in spite of everything.”

Dr. Condé’s first marriage ended in divorce. In 1982, she married Philcox, her translator. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Dr. Condé was twice shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, first in 2015 for her entire body of work and then in 2023 for her last published novel, “The Gospel According to the New World.”

The book was a reworking of the New Testament, following a Jesus-like figure from Martinique. Dr. Condé told the Times that she had long “dreamed of writing about the Bible and the New Testament, which I believed to be a series of sumptuous stories and not really a religious text,” although she didn’t quite know how to tell the story.

“I was torn between mockery and the spiritual,” she added. “Very often, I imagined God as an ordinary Guadeloupean who went about his daily activities such as playing cards, drinking rum or going to the cock pit.”