Collection: Simone Schwarz-Bart

Simone Schwarz-Bart (née Brumant) was born in 1938 in Charente, on the southwest coast of France, and moved with her mother to Guadeloupe when she was three months old. Her father was a soldier in the French army and was absent for the first six years of her life. She later studied in Paris, where she met her future husband, the French writer André Schwarz-Bart. They collaborated on two novels, Un plat de porc aux bananes verts (A Dish of Pork with Green Bananas) and La mulâtresse Solitude (A Woman Named Solitude), as well as a six-volume encyclopedic work, Hommage à la femme noire (In Praise of Black Women). Schwarz-Bart has traveled widely, living in Senegal and Switzerland and Paris, and eventually settling in Goyave, a small community in Guadeloupe. For a time, she ran a Creole furniture business, and later a restaurant. The Bridge of Beyond, a best seller that Patrick Chamoiseau called “inexhaustible and unfathomable,” was awarded Elle magazine’s literary prize. Schwarz-Bart is also the author of the novel Ti Jean L’ horizon (Between Two Worlds), and a play, Ton beau capitaine (Your Handsome Captain).