Novels about wide-scale violence in Algeria and Rwanda have won France’s two most important literary prizes and been hailed as groundbreaking narratives about the pressure on younger generations to come to terms with conflict in post-colonial societies.
The French-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud won the Goncourt literary prize for his novel, Houris, about a young woman scarred by the violence of Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s. The writer and hip-hop artist Gaël Faye won the Renaudot prize for his bestselling novel, Jacaranda, about young people navigating the legacy of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
