The publisher Gallimard denounces defamatory campaigns against Kamel Daoud, 2024 Goncourt prize for “Houris”

According to Algerian media, a survivor of a massacre during the Black Decade who was medically followed by Kamel Daoud’s wife, said she recognized herself in the main character of the novel “Houris”.

Antoine Gallimard, the president of Editions Gallimard, denounced the attacks on Monday, November 18 defamatory against the Franco-Algerian author Kamel Daoud, Goncourt 2024 for his novel Hourisaccused by a victim of the civil war in Algeria of having exploited his history and his traumas.

“And Houris is inspired by tragic events that occurred in Algeria during the civil war of the 1990s, its plot, its characters and its heroine are purely fictional”says Antoine Gallimard in a press release. “Since the publication of his novel, Kamel Daoud has been the subject of violent defamatory campaigns orchestrated by certain media close to a regime whose nature is well known”continues the director of the publishing house who was banned from presenting his works at the Algiers international book fair, which ended on Saturday November 16.

The ban on participating in this show was notified to Editions Gallimard at the beginning of October, when HourisKamel Daoud’s novel about the violence of the “black decade” (between 1992 and 2002), was already seen as one of Goncourt’s great favorites. He won the prize, the most important in French literature, on November 4, 2024.

The book could not be published in Algeria, where it falls under a law prohibiting any work on this bloody period which left at least 200,000 dead, according to official figures. “After the ban on the book and our publishing house at the Algiers book fair, it is the turn of his wife [psychiatre de profession]which in no way provided the basis for the writing of Houristo be affected in his professional integrity”, continues Gallimard.

According to Algerian media, Saâda Arbane, survivor of a massacre during the Black Decade, who was medically followed by Kamel Daoud’s wife, says she recognized herself in the main character of her novel.

Houris which in the Muslim faith designates young girls promised to paradise, is a dark novel taking place partly in Oran on the fate of Aube, a young woman who has been mute since an Islamist slit her throat on December 31, 1999.