The oldest and most prestigious literary prize in France was awarded this Monday, November 4 to Kamel Daoud for Houris.
The 2024 Goncourt Prize was awarded this Tuesday to Kamel Daoud for Houris. He succeeds Jean-Baptiste Andrea, recipient of the prize in 2023 for Watch over her.
Presented as the big favorite, the 54-year-old Franco-Algerian author and former journalist was chosen by the jury in the first round, receiving six votes, against two for Hélène Gaudy, one for Gaël Faye, winner of the Renaudot, and one for Sandrine Collette, announced the president of the Académie Goncourt, the writer Philippe Claudel.
“It's your dream, paid for by your years of life. To my deceased father. To my mother who is still alive, but who no longer remembers anything. No words exist to say the true thank you”, declared the writer on X.
Account of the massacres during the Algerian Civil War
Published by Gallimard editions, 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.
“I had always wanted to write my point of view on the Civil War. When I followed the Civil War as a journalist, I had a lot of extra material that I didn't put in my articles. My book, it’s, among other things, this extra material,” he confided to Transfuge magazine at the beginning of October.
“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 much literature, in its high freedom of “auscultation of reality, its emotional density, traces alongside the historical story of a people, another path of memory”, greeted the president of the Goncourt Academy.
Already a Goncourt finalist in 2014 with his work Meursault, counter-investigation, the writer then won the Goncourt prize for the first novel.
Houris 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.
The Goncourt Prize, an economic issue
The Goncourt was presented, as tradition dictates, at lunchtime at the Drouant restaurant, in the Opéra district of Paris. Four authors were finalists: Kamel Daoud with HourisSandrine Collette with Madelaine before dawnHélène Gaudy with Archipelagos et Gaël Faye, 42 years old, with Jacaranda.
The Goncourt 2024 is the first awarded under the presidency of Philippe Claudel. Elected to this position in May, this writer said he wanted “to be a democratic president, of whom the jurors can be proud”.
He made it clear that he would do everything possible to ensure that the Goncourt Academy does not repeat the scenario of 2022 and 2023, namely 14 rounds of voting, the maximum planned, due to a persistent tie between two authors with five votes to five.
Beyond the pride of adding one's name to the list, the Goncourt Prize is an economic issue. He is rewarded with a check for ten euros, which the winners traditionally choose to frame.
But above all, it makes it possible to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of a book that many readers will be curious to discover or offer, and it opens the way to numerous translations throughout the world.
