The Goncourt prize awarded to Kamel Daoud, Gaël Faye obtains the Renaudot

Published on November 4, 2024 at 1:02 p.m.

For several days, it seemed accepted that the 2024 Goncourt Prize was between Kamel Daoud and Gaël Faye, with no one mentioning the names of Sandrine Collette and Hélène Gaudy, although they were still in the running. This Monday, November 4, the jurors of the prestigious prize, gathered as tradition dictates at the Drouant restaurant in Paris, announced their champion: the Franco-Algerian Kamel Daoud, whose book “Houris” won in the first round of vote with six votes. The Franco-Rwandan Gaël Faye did not waste his day since the Renaudot prize was awarded to him simultaneously for “Jacaranda”.

Published on August 15 by Gallimard, “Houris” is the third novel by Kamel Daoud, already winner of the Goncourt for first novel in 2015 for “Meursault, contre-investigation”. “Houris” evokes recent historical events: the civil war of the “black decade” in Algeria. Kamel Daoud, 54, was then a young journalist in Oran and covered massacres committed by Islamists.

The 2024 Renaudot prize awarded to Gaël Faye

Gaël Faye, 42, is as well known as a singer as a writer. And this is thanks to the phenomenon “Petit pays” (Grasset, 2016), a bestseller adapted in particular for the cinema and awarded by the Goncourt for high school students. “Jacaranda” looks back on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. But while “Little Country” told the story of Rwanda essentially through the eyes of a child from Burundi, this new novel follows the journey of a Franco-Rwandan who grew up in the Paris region before leaving for Kigali in search of his past .

More information to come…