Rachid Maboudi with agencies
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3.22pm – November 3, 2024
According to literary critics interviewed by the French magazine Weekly Booksthe author of Hourisan anti-diet writer, has a good chance of entering his name on the list of the most prestigious prizes this Monday, November 4.
The Goncourt Prize final on Monday is widely seen as a bitter confrontation between Kamel Daoud and Gaël Faye, two authors exploring the memorial past of Algeria and Rwanda. The Gallimard publishing house, which publishes Kamel Daoud’s novel censored in Algeria, was asked not to go to the Algiers Book Fair in November. “We were forbidden to come, without being given a reason”said a spokesperson for the publishing house in October.
The 27e edition of the Algiers Book Fair, at the Pins Maritimes exhibition center, is scheduled from November 6 to 16. Gallimard’s illustrious novel during this literary season is Hourisby the Franco-Algerian Kamel Daoud, fiction which returns to the civil war in Algeria, between 1992 and 2002, also called the “black decade.”
However, as the author writes in his novel and the AFP reminds us, Algerian law prohibits any mention in a book of the bloody events of that time, which prevents Houris be published or even imported there.
The most prestigious French-speaking literary prize must be awarded to the Drouant restaurant in Paris, as has been the tradition since the 1914 edition of Goncourt.
This election, decided by ten jurors, risks being squeezed between two fictions, Houris (editions Gallimard), on the massacres of the “black decade” Algerian, and Jacaranda (Editions Grasset), on the post-genocide in Rwanda.
According to six literary journalists interviewed by Weekly BooksKamel Daoud is the favorite. There are five of them to see him crowned, including one of them who claims that two jurors “may have recently changed course”for the benefit of the Franco-Algerian author.
