The 2024 Goncourt Prize is awarded to Kamel Daoud for his novel “Houris”

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

“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 slit her throat on December 31, 1999. The plot begins in Oran then continues into the Algerian desert, where Aube leaves to return to her village.

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“I only put 20% of the horrors I saw in the book…” Kamel Daoud, author of “Houris”

“It's a book that can also give meaning to what we experience in that country. But it was born because I came to France. Because it's a country that gives me the freedom to write”, greeted Kamel Daoud, at the Drouant restaurant in Paris, where the Goncourt is presented. France “is a country that protects writers”, greeted the 54-year-old writer who left Oran for Paris and took French nationality. His book “Houris” cannot be published in Algeria, where it falls under the law which prohibits any work evoking the civil war of 1992-2002.

“Houris gives voice to the suffering linked to a dark period in Algeria”.

Kamel Daoud's novel was chosen by the jury in the first round, receiving 6 votes, against 2 votes for Hélène Gaudy, 1 vote for Gaël Faye, winner of the Renaudot, and 1 vote for Sandrine Collette, announced the president of the Académie Goncourt, the writer Philippe Claudel. “Houris gives voice to the suffering linked to a dark period in Algeria, that of women in particular. This novel shows how literature, in its high freedom of auscultation of reality, its emotional density, traces, alongside the historical narrative of a people, another path of memory”, greeted Philippe Claudel, head of the Goncourt jury.

Another literary prize: the Renaudot prize was awarded to the novelist Gaël Faye, who was one of the favorites for the Goncourt, for his second novel “Jacaranda” on the reconstruction of Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. His first novel “Petit pays”, Goncourt prize for high school students 2016, was a huge bookstore success.