The Goncourt Prize was awarded this Monday, November 4 to the Franco-Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud for his novel “Houris” (ed. Gallimard), about “the black decade” in Algeria. He was chosen by the jury in the first round, receiving 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. “I am very happy, it’s cliché, but no other words,” reacted the 54-year-old writer at the Drouant restaurant in Paris, where the Goncourt and Renaudot prizes are announced.
“The Goncourt Academy crowns a book where lyricism competes with tragedy, and which gives voice to the suffering linked to a dark period in Algeria, that of women in particular. This novel shows how much literature, in its high freedom of “auscultation of reality, its emotional density, traces alongside the historical story of a people, another path of memory”, greeted Philippe Claudel.
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Banned in Algeria
“Houris”, which in the Muslim faith designates young girls promised to paradise, is a dark novel about the fate of Aube, a young woman who has been mute since an Islamist cut her throat on December 31, 1999. Choosing as narrator a woman, Kamel Daoud places the plot first in Oran, the city where he was a journalist during the “black decade”, then in the Algerian desert, where Aube leaves to return to his village.
This is the third novel by this author, the first published by Gallimard. It had already won the Landerneau Readers' Prize in October, and cannot be published in Algeria, where it falls under the law which prohibits any work evoking the civil war of 1992-2002.
The Renaudot prize for Gaël Faye
The novelist Gaël Faye, who was one of the favorites for the Goncourt, was awarded the Renaudot prize on Monday for his second novel “Jacaranda” on the reconstruction of Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. While in the first “Petit pays”, prize Goncourt des lycéens 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 mother Rwandan. This young man, Milan, will discover Kigali, the omnipresence of the memory of the genocide, and members of his family.
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It’s “a lot of joy, a big surprise”, reacted Gaël Faye. A 42-year-old Franco-Rwandan, he has an atypical profile in the French literary landscape: between slam, music and literature, he is an artist with multiple talents, whose pen is as alert as his themes are serious.
