The Franco-Algerian writer received the Goncourt Prize this Monday for Houris. A novel about the fate of Aube, a young woman who has been mute since an Islamist slit her throat on December 31, 1999.
The Franco-Algerian Kamel Daoud, winner of the Goncourt Prize on Monday for his novel Houris on the “black decade” in Algeria, paid tribute to France, “a country which protects writers” and “gives them the freedom to write”.
“I know that we like to do 'French bashing' but for me, this country is a welcoming country for writers, for writing and all that which comes from elsewhere”, he said. -he declared from the Goncourt salon in Paris.
“You always need three things to write: a table, a chair and a country. I have all three,” he added.
“I’m very happy, it’s cliché, but there are no other words,” he said. “(This award) has meaning for my parents. For my publishers. For this country that welcomes me. It's a wonderful thing that's happening.”
Chosen first title
On 'exists to say the real thank you.'
Kamel Daoud was chosen by the jury in the first round, collecting 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.
“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,” praised Philippe Claudel.
“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,” he further declared.
Cannot be published in Algeria
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 Kamel Daoud's third novel. 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.
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