French-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud on Monday won France's top literary prize, the Goncourt, for a novel set during Algeria's civil war between the government and Islamists in the 1990s. His main rival was Burundi-born Gaël Faye, who was Monday handed the prix Renaudot, another coveted prize.
The jury needed just one round of voting to award the coveted prize to Algerian writer Daoud for his novel Houris about what has become known as Algeria's "black decade".
Daoud reacted on social media by dedicating the prize to his deceased father and his mother, who is still alive, but who no longer remembers anything, thanking them for their support, and posting a photo of his parents.
The writer – the first Algerian to win the Goncourt in France – is known for stirring controversy with his analyses of society in Algeria and elsewhere in the Arab world.
The title Houris is a reference to beautiful, virginal companions for faithful Muslim men in paradise. It tells the story of a young woman who loses her voice when an Islamist cuts her throat as she witnesses her family being massacred during the civil war.
She later shares her experiences with her unborn child through an internal monologue.
"With Houris, the Goncourt Academy has crowned a book in which lyricism duels with tragedy and which gives a voice to the suffering linked to a dark time in Algeria, especially for women," said Goncourt president Philippe Claudel.
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However, the subject appears to challenge Algeria's continuing reluctance to address the civil war from 1992 to 2002 in public.
The conflict between Islamist groups against the Algerian army killed tens of thousands of people, with some estimates as high as 200,000.
Since then, Algeria has implemented a charter for peace and national reconciliation, which prohibits the evocation of the "wounds of the national tragedy".
The novel is banned in Algeria and its French publisher Gallimard was blocked from this month's Algiers international book fair.
Banned in Algeria
Publishing Houris was only possible "because I came to France", Daoud told reporters. "Because this is a country that granted me the freedom to write," said the 54-year-old who left his Algerian home city of Oran for France "because of circumstances" and was given citizenship.
Daoud became known internationally for his 2013 debut novel The Meursault Investigation, a retelling of Albert Camus' The Stranger, from an opposite angle. He won the First Novel category of the Goncourt prize with this book.
In 2016 – following numerous cases of sexual assault on women by Arab migrants in Cologne, Germany – he wrote an op-ed piece published in the New York Times called "The Sexual Misery of the Arab World".
He said that "in some of Allah's lands, the war on women and on couples has the air of an inquisition", concluding that "sex in the Muslim world is sick".
Algerian writer wins world French literature prize
From Algeria to Rwanda
Daoud's main rival for this year's edition was Gaël Faye; writer, composer and rapper, 42, whose novel Jacaranda deals with the rebuilding of Rwanda after the 1994 genocide.
Faye was handed the Prix Renaudot, another coveted prize awarded during the French literary competition season, on Monday while losing the Goncourt to Daoud.
Jacaranda is the second novel by Faye, born in Burundi to a Rwandan mother and a French father, who has lived in Kigali for about ten years.
Like his previous one, Petit Pays, (Small country) this novel retales the lives of Rwandans in the shadow of the massacres of 1994.
The prestigious prizes usually spark book sales in the hundreds of thousands for the winning authors.
Released in 2016, Faye's first novel Petit Pays won, among other prizes, the Goncourt des lycéens, then sold 1.5 million copies, got translated around the world, has been adapted into a comic book, and later a film.
President Emmanuel Macron, congratulated both writers on social media platform X, saying that "thanks to their voices, our French language expresses beauty, tragedy and universality even better".
(with newswires)
