Did the 2024 Goncourt Prize Kamel Daoud violate medical confidentiality? Two complaints filed in Algeria

JUSTICE – A resemblance to real events not entirely coincidental? The Franco-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud and his psychiatrist wife are the target of two complaints which were filed in Algeria, the complainant’s lawyer announced to AFP this Wednesday, November 20. The couple is accused of having revealed and used the story of a patient to write the novel Houris by Kamel Daoud, who has just been awarded the Prix Goncourt 2024.

“As soon as the book was published, we filed two complaints against Kamel Daoud and his wife Aicha Dehdouh, the psychiatrist who treated the victim,” declared Me Fatima Benbraham. She specifies that she has seized the court of Oran, where the author and the doctor reside in Algeria.

According to this well-known lawyer in Algeria, the complaints relate to “the violation of medical confidentiality, since the doctor handed over all of his patient’s file to her husband, as well as the defamation of victims of terrorism and the violation of the law on national reconciliation”which prohibits any publication on the period of the civil war between 1992 and 2002.

“The first complaint was filed on behalf of the National Organization of Victims of Terrorism” et “the second in the name of the victim”specified Maitre Benbraham, assuring that their deposit dates back to August, “a few days after the book was published”and well before the award of the Prix Goncourt to the novel at the beginning of November.

“We did not want to talk about it, so that it would not be said that we wanted to disrupt the author’s nomination for the prize”she said.

A novel about the black decade in Algeria

Kamel Daoud did not respond to these accusations, but his French publisher Gallimard denounced on Monday November 18 the “ violent defamatory campaigns orchestrated by certain media close to a regime whose nature no one is ignorant of”against the writer since the publication of the novel.

“If 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”said Gallimard. In the novel, the main character tells the child that she is responsible for the massacre of her entire family on December 31, 1999, during which Islamists attempted to slit her throat, leaving her disfigured and mute.

The complainant who accuses the psychiatrist of having told her story to her writer husband, Saâda Arbane, is a survivor of a massacre during the Algerian civil war. She had already spoken on the Algerian channel One TV, accusing the author of having revealed her story in the novel without her authorization. She said she recognized elements of her life there: “ his cannula (for breathing and speaking, editor’s note), his scars, his tattoos, his hair salon”.

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