“My heart was beating” before the announcement “because it gives meaning to a lot of things”, welcomes Kamel Daoud

The writer Kamel Daoud won the Goncourt on Monday for his novel “Houris”.

“My heart was racing because it gives meaning to a lot of things,” welcomes, Tuesday, November 5, on France Inter the writer Kamel Daoud, who won the Goncourt, prestigious literary prize, on Monday for his novel Houris (Gallimard editions).

The novelist recognizes that “joy, when it is too intense, turns into a cliché”pushing him to “dive back into your memory”. He thus wishes to pay tribute to his parents, and in particular to his mother “who can neither read nor write, who has never been to school”. “She dreamed for me of success, visibility, greatness and she always put it in my head that I was exceptional and that everyone would eventually know it”he says. The Franco-Algerian novelist insists on “the sacrifices” made by his parents in his childhood. He remembers, for example, that “his father did [parfois] pretending not to finish his plate so that[il] can eat.”

The writer explains that he chose to write his novels in French, and not in Arabic, because he “experienced French as an intimate language”. “I was in a family that didn't speak it, that didn't read it and the only place where I had an island to myself, where I encountered naked women, flying carpets and adventures, was the French language”, he confides.

Kamel Daoud finally returns to the banning of his book in Algeria, the sale of works relating to the civil war of 1992-2002 being illegal. Despite this ban, his book is still circulating, but under wraps. the writer also jokes about the fact that such a ban represents the best way to “to circulate as quickly as possible” a book. “It reaches the status of the biblical apple”, he laughs. Apart from his own book, Kamel Daoud affirms that the issue behind these bans is to know “which books will be before the eyes of readers” Algerians. “Perhaps by mine, not those of Gallimard, but perhaps books which will produce laws prohibiting women from speaking out loud”he warns.