Kamel Daoud wins the Prix Goncourt with “Houris”

The faded voice of its narrator, whose vocal cords were destroyed during the Algerian civil war, carried far. The ten Goncourt jurors decided this: the most prestigious French prize was awarded to Kamel Daoud, for “Houris”. The 54-year-old Franco-Algerian started favorite with Gail Fayefacing Sandrine Collette and Hélène Gaudy.

As has been the tradition for over a century, the decision was made at lunchtime at the Drouant restaurant, in the Opéra district of Paris. Kamel Daoud was chosen by the jury in the first round, collecting six votes, against two for Hélène Gaudy, one for Gaël Faye, and one for Sandrine Collette, announced the president of the Académie Goncourt, the writer Philippe Claudel.

Camel Daoud even appeared as an ultra-favorite. His novel “Houris” (ed. Gallimard), looks back on the massacres of the Algerian “black decade”, which left 200,000 dead in ten years. A war that no one has the right to talk about in the country. Aube, survivor of the massacre where all her family perished, emerged disfigured and mute. She nevertheless speaks silently about this war to the daughter she is carrying, returning to the scene of the tragedy…

His most serious competitor was Gaël Faye with “Jacaranda” (ed. Grasset), another fiction which revisits a painful story, this time on the reconstruction of Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. The two authors have in common not only that of to have success in bookstores during this literary season, but to have already been finalists of the Goncourt, respectively in 2014 and 2016. Kamel Daoud, selected with “Meursault, contre-investigation”, then won the Goncourt prize for the first novel, while Gaël Faye won the Goncourt for high school students with “Petit pays”.

The Goncourt 2024 is the first awarded under the presidency of Philippe Claudel. A change which is important because the presidential vote counts double.

In the top sales

If the check that accompanies the prize is only ten euros, obtaining the reward confers a certain prestige, and above all a dazzling acceleration in sales, up to hundreds of thousands of copies. Enough to open the way to numerous translations.

The Goncourt was thus the most influential prize in 2023. Its winner, Jean-Baptiste Andrea, sold 627,180 copies of “Veiller sur elle” (The Iconoclast). That is 200,000 more than the record for the year 2022 held by Giuliano da Empoli, winner of the Novel of the French Academy with “The Mage of the Kremlin” (Gallimard).

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