Algeria’s “Goncourt choice” suspended

The Goncourt Academy made this decision in reaction to the banning of “Houris” by Kamel Daoud in this country.

Algeria will not have a “Goncourt choice” in 2025. “The Goncourt Academy, meeting on December 3, 2024, unanimously decided to suspend the Goncourt choice of Algeria”indicated the Goncourt Prize jury in a press release published on Tuesday evening.

The most prestigious literary prize is divided into national competitions which involve juries of French-speaking students, with the support of the French Institute. But “Houris” by Kamel Daoud (Gallimard) cannot compete, under Algerian law which prohibits any book evoking the massacres of the “black decade” (1992-2002).

The Academy “cannot accept” that this novel “be banned in this country and its publisher banned from the Algiers Book Fair”she added. Gallimard editions were not allowed to attend this show, organized from November 6 to 16.

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The jurors also expressed their solidarity with another Franco-Algerian writer, Boualem Sansal, arrested in mid-November at Algiers airport and since imprisoned for endangering state security. “At a time when the writer Boualem Sansal is arbitrarily incarcerated because of his writings and his comments, [l’Académie Goncourt] reaffirms its condemnation of any attack on freedom of expression”wrote the jury. Another literary circle had mobilized, the French Academy, where certain members had tried to have the writer urgently elected under the Dome, without success.

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Kamel Daoud won the Goncourt Prize on November 4 for “Houris”, a lyrical and violent text about the dark decade in Algeria.

Two weeks later, in a complaint against him and his psychiatrist wife, an Algerian woman accused him of having based the plot of “Houris” on his personal story, without her consent, and even though she had initially refused. a sum of money for this.

Goncourt's choice of Algeria in 2024, for its sixth edition, involved around a hundred jurors, most of them high school or university students, from ten cities. It went to Jean-Baptiste Andréa for “Veiller sur elle” (L’Iconoclaste), just like the Goncourt prize.