France | The Goncourt Prize awarded to Kamel Daoud

(Paris) The Goncourt Prize, the most prestigious of French literary prizes, was awarded Monday to the Franco-Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud for his novel Houris (editions Gallimard), fiction on the massacres of the Algerian “black decade” (1992-2002).

“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.

He was chosen by the jury in the first round, receiving six votes, against two for Hélène Gaudy, one for Sandrine Collette and one for Gaël Faye, announced the president of the Académie Goncourt, the writer Philippe Claudel.

Gaël Faye was awarded the French Renaudot prize for his second novel Jacaranda on the reconstruction of Rwanda after the 1994 genocide.

“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 literature, in its high freedom of auscultation of reality, its emotional density, traces alongside the historical story of a people, another path of memory,” praised Philippe Claudel.

Houriswhich 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.

Choosing a woman as narrator, 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 her 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.