The 2024 Goncourt Prize was awarded, Monday, November 4, to Kamel Daoud for his novel Houris. The ten jurors, gathered at the Drouant restaurant in Paris, praised the novel by the Franco-Algerian author for its fiction on the massacres of the “black decade” Algerian (1992-2002).
He was chosen by the jury in the first round, collecting six votes, against two for Hélène Gaudy, one for Gaël Faye, winner of the Renaudot, and one for Sandrine Collette, announced the president of the Académie Goncourt, the writer Philippe Claudel.
The 54-year-old Franco-Algerian was preferred to Gaël Faye (Jacaranda), Sandrine Collette (Madelaine before dawn) and Hélène Gaudy (Archipelagos). He succeeds Jean-Baptiste Andrea, awarded in 2023 for his novel Watch over her.
Houris could not be exported to Algeria, let alone translated into Arabic. As the author writes in his novel, Algerian law prohibits any mention in a book of the bloody events of the “black decade”the civil war between power and Islamists between 1992 and 2002. In Algeria, “I am attacked because I am neither communist, nor decolonial, nor anti-French”, said this “exiled by force of circumstances” au Pointthe French magazine where he is a columnist, in August.
He took French nationality. Even saying, in reference to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, born Polish and naturalized in the middle of the First World War: “I have Apollinaire syndrome, I am more French than the French”. Among a large part of Algerian opinion and intelligentsia, he cannot shake off the label of traitor to his country.
Many Algerians, on the contrary, admire his writing, his knowledge of the country's history and his stubbornness in asking the angry questions. Starting with the publisher Sofiane Hadjadj, from Barzakh editions, who published in 2013 Meursault, counter-investigation. “He invented his own way of writing”, he commented at the time of the dazzling success of this novel, spotted by Actes Sud. Released in France in 3,000 copies in May 2014, this rereading of the plot of The Stranger by Albert Camus will be one of the literary sensations of the year, with more than 100,000 copies sold. A finalist for the Goncourt prize, the work won the Goncourt for high school students, among others.
What the two authors have in common is not only having success in bookstores during this literary season but having already been finalists at the Goncourt, respectively in 2014 and 2016. Kamel Daoud, with Meursault, counter-investigationthen won the Goncourt prize for the first novel, while Gaël Faye, with Small country, the Goncourt of high school students.
The Renaudot prize was awarded to Gaël Faye for his novel, another fiction, on the reconstruction of Rwanda after the 1994 genocide.
While in his first novel Small country, Goncourt prize for high school students in 2016 and huge bookstore success, the author took the point of view of a boy who grew up in Burundi, this time the narrator grew up in France, in Versailles, of a French father and a Rwandan mother.
