The Goncourt 2024 awarded to novelist Kamel Daoud

The Goncourt Prize, the most prestigious French literary prize, was awarded Monday to the Franco-Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud for his novel Houris (editions Gallimard), a fiction about the massacres of the Algerian “black decade” (1992-2002).

He was chosen by the jury in the first round, receiving six votes, against two for Hélène Gaudy, one for Sandrine Collette and one for Gaël Faye, announced the president of the Académie Goncourt, the writer Philippe Claudel.

Gaël Faye received the French Renaudot prize on Monday for his second novel, Jacaranda, on the reconstruction of Rwanda after the 1994 genocide.

The winner of the Goncourt, Kamel Daoud, 54, is a chronicler critical of Algeria whose freedom of tone ended up forcing him to leave his city of Oran for Paris, reluctantly.

Hourishis novel, could not be exported to Algeria and even less translated into Arabic.

As the author writes in his novel, Algerian law prohibits any mention in a book of the bloody events of the dark decadethe civil war between power and Islamists between 1992 and 2002.

In Algeria, I am attacked because I am neither communist, nor decolonial, nor anti-Frenchsaid this exile by the 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.

A controversial writer at home in Algeria

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 controversial questions.

Starting with the publisher Sofiane Hadjadj, from Barzakh editions, who published in 2013 Meursault, counter-investigation.

He invented his own way of writinghe said at the time of the dazzling success of this novel, spotted by Actes Sud.

Released in France in 3000 copies in May 2014, this rereading of the plot of The Stranger by Albert Camus will be one of the literary successes 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.

Comments made on French television then earned Kamel Daoud a diatribe from a Salafist imam, which would have been a fatwa if its author had had the legitimacy. A court will condemn this imam in 2016 for death threatsbefore an appeal court buried the case.

Son of a gendarme, Kamel Daoud was born in Mostaganem (north-west) in June 1970, the eldest of six children. He was raised by his grandparents in a village where he became the imam as a teenager, rubbing shoulders with Islamists, before moving away from religion.

The only one of his siblings to study literature, he turned towards journalism, first at DetectiveAlgerian version of the news magazine, then in a major French-speaking newspaper, The Daily from Oran.

A dangerous job

As he explained during the promotion of Hourisjournalist positions became available after assassinations. The job was dangerous and very delicate: it was necessary to give reports of massacres that everyone wanted to conceal, minimize or exaggerate.

His reputation for integrity comes from this period, then from articles and columns where he bluntly denounced everything that is eating away at Algerian society: corruption, religious hypocrisy, neglect of power, violence, archaisms, inequalities.

Father of two children, he stopped journalism in 2016, in favor of literature.

It was after a lively controversy, in France and beyond, over his denunciation in The World of the sexual misery in the Arab-Muslim world, the sick relationship with women, the body and desire. Some had accused him of maintaining a racist cliché.

I have the right to think and defend my ideashe replied, in an interview with AFP in 2017. Every Algerian does not need to be on the same wavelength.