Marie-Claire Matip Marie-Claire Matip Marie-Claire-Eléonore-Débochère Matip (born 1938) is a Cameroonian writer living in Paris. The daughter of a tribal leader, she was born in Eséka; her father had about fifty children from several different mothers. She was schooled at home at first and then attended school locally. Then, she studied at a college for girls in Douala, where she wrote her novel "Ngonda". In 1956, she won a contest sponsored by "Elle" magazine and Air France that allowed her to travel to France; she returned the following year. In 1958, she studied for her baccalauréat at the Lycée Général Leclerc in
Marie-Claire Blais Marie-Claire Blais Marie-Claire Blais, (born 5 October 1939) is a French Canadian writer, novelist, poet, and playwright from the province of Quebec. Blais was born to a blue collar family in Quebec City. She studied at a convent school, but had to interrupt her education to seek employment. At the age of seventeen, she enrolled in a few classes at Université Laval, where she met Jeanne Lapointe and Father Georges-Henri Lévesque, who encouraged her to write. She published her first novel "La Belle Bête" (translated as "Mad Shadows") in 1959, when she turned 20. She has since written more than