The Algerian journalist and novelist Camel Daoud54, is crowned with the 2024 Goncourt prize for Hourispublished on August 15 by Gallimard editions. The proclamation took place this Monday, November 4, at Drouant.
His novel was elected in the first round of voting with six votes.
Already crowned with the 2024 Landerneau Readers’ Prize and the Transfuge Prize for best French novel, Houris appeared, with Jacaranda of Gail Faye (Grasset), among the favorites of this 2024 edition of the Prix Goncourt, ahead of the two other finalists Madelaine before dawn of Sandrine Collette (JC Lattès) and Archipelagos d’Hélène Gaudy (The Olivier).
Houris was also included in the selections for the Grand Prix du roman of the French Academy and the Interallié Prize. He is also among the finalists for the Renaudot prize.
« Novel with lyrical courage » according to our review Sean Rose, Houris tells the story of Aube, a young mute Algerian woman, dreaming of a voice transplant. Like the painful memories that the war of independence and the civil war of the 1990s left as a legacy, Aube is marked in her flesh by a form of scar on her neck. Pregnant, she goes to her native village to question the dead, questioning her right to keep the unborn child. According to our review Sean Rose,
The novel, which earned Kamel Daoud, as well as his publisher, a ban on participation in the last Algiers Salon, has to date reached 77,000 copies sold according to GFK.
Its sales could be multiplied by ten in the coming weeks: 2023 winner of the Goncourt prize, Watch over her of Jean-Baptiste Andrea (The Iconoclast), for example, has sold nearly 630,000 copies.
Kamel Daoud is not his first success. Revealed to the public thanks to his first novel Meursault, counter-investigation published in 2014 by Actes Sud, it had already appeared that year in the selections for the Goncourt and Renaudot prizes, even appearing in the final selection of the Goncourt. In 2015, he was finally awarded the Goncourt prize for the first novel. Meursault, counter-investigation also won the 2014 Francophonie Five Continents Prize and the 2014 François-Mauriac Prize of the Aquitaine region.
Houris by Kamel Daoud is the 40e Goncourt Prize won by Gallimard since the creation of the prize in 1903, which places the publishing house of the Madrigall group at the forefront of the most awarded publishers, ahead of Grasset (17 times) and Albin Michel (12 times).
“Houris”: the publisher’s presentation
« I am the real trace, the strongest evidence attesting to everything we have experienced in ten years in Algeria. I hide the story of an entire war, written on my skin since I was a child. »
Aube is a young Algerian who must remember the war of independence, which she did not live through, and forget the civil war of the 1990s, which she herself went through. His tragedy is marked on his body: a scar on his neck and destroyed vocal cords. Mute, she dreams of finding her voice again.
She can only tell her story to the girl she carries in her womb. But does she have the right to keep this child? Can you give life when it has almost been taken from you? In a country that has passed laws to punish anyone who talks about the civil war, Aube decides to go to his native village, where it all began, and where the dead will perhaps answer him.
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