Kamel Daoud wins the “Houris” bet – Libération

The Franco-Algerian writer received the famous prize on Monday for an instructive novel despite some heaviness, in which he gives voice to a woman victim of Algeria's dark decade.

It was rumored that the lucky candidate for Goncourt would be one of the two candidates, one of the two men who remained in the running, Kamel Daoud and Gaël Faye. To the first, Daoud, went the Goncourt, and to the second the Renaudot. The author of Houris (Gallimard) almost won the award in 2015 for Meursault, counter-investigation (South Acts). About ten years later, here is the writer and journalist born in Algeria in 1970 who won an award for his third novel, even though he recently left Oran to settle in France. He also, but less importantly, changed publishing house. Since 2014 he has been targeted by a fatwa and in 2016, accused of Islamophobia after an article he wrote for the Worldhe announced that he would give up his journalistic activity. He remains a columnist at Point.

Houris is an essential, instructive and courageous novel, so much so that we put aside the fact that it is overloaded with allegories and weighed down by these symbols. When it opens, its energy is astonishing and envelops the reader.