Kamel Daoud wins with his novel “Houris”, the Renaudot prize for Gaël Faye and “Jacaranda”

“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.

“Houris”, which 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.

“I am very happy, it’s cliché, but no other words,” reacted the 54-year-old writer.

Gaël Faye awarded the Renaudot

The novelist and singer Gaël Faye, who was one of the favorites for the Goncourt, was awarded the Renaudot prize for his second novel “Jacaranda” on the reconstruction of Rwanda after the 1994 genocide.

While in the first “Little Country”, the 2016 Goncourt high school prize and huge bookstore success, the author took the point of view of a boy who grew up in Burundi, this time the narrator grew up in France, in Versailles. , of a French father and a Rwandan mother. This young man, Milan, will discover Kigali, the omnipresence of the memory of the genocide, and members of his family.