Kamel Daoud accused of stealing the story of his Goncourt, Gallimard denounces “defamatory” attacks – Libération

A 31-year-old Algerian woman claims that the Franco-Algerian author was inspired by her life to write her novel “Houris”, based on confidences she shared with her psychiatrist, the writer's wife. The Parisian publisher claims that the characters in the book are “purely fictional”.

This Friday, November 15, was a very ordinary day in Oran. Without turbulence, probably either, in Paris, for the writer Kamel Daoud, freshly crowned with the Goncourt prize for his novel Hourison the violence of the black decade. A literary consecration that could have brought together Algerians. Then suddenly, an image appeared on the Algerian television channel One TV.

A woman, Saâda Arbane, 31, speaks, supported by her husband and helped by a device to express herself, the result of an attempted throat slitting. In his broken voice, an old horror story resurfaces. His. The massacre of an entire village in Tiaret, the loss of his entire family, a six-year-old girl with her throat half slit, left for dead, miraculously saved by her big sister who was screaming to attract the attention of the terrorists before perishing.

But it is not the massacre that Saâda comes to denounce: it is what she considers to be a second trauma. She claims to have been plundered from her story by Kamel Daoud to feed her award-winning story. The young woman did not need to read the entire book to recognize the contours of her life in Aube's destiny,