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Yesterday, Monday, the French writer of Algerian origin, Kamal Daoud, was awarded the Goncourt Prize, which is considered the most prominent Francophone literary award, for his novel “The Nymphs,” published by Gallimard, which deals with the civil war in Algeria between 1992 and 2002, known as the “Black Decade.”
The 54-year-old writer said in the Drouan restaurant, where the names of the winners of the Goncourt and Renaudot awards were announced, “I am very happy. It is a worn-out phrase, but there are no other words.”
Daoud was one of the names that attracted the most attention from observers this year, especially after the Algerian writer came close to winning the Goncourt Prize for the year 2014 for his French-language novel “Meursault, contre-enquete” (Meursault, contre-enquete).
Daoud received 6 votes out of the ten members of the Goncourt Academy, compared to two for Frenchwoman Eileen Gode and one each for her compatriot Sandrine Collette and Frenchman of Rwandan origin Gaël Faye, who received the Ronaudo Prize, according to what the president of the Goncourt Academy, writer Philippe Claudel, announced.
Claudel explained, “The Goncourt Academy crowned a book in which lyric poems compete with tragedy, and which expresses the sufferings associated with a dark period in Algerian history, especially what women suffered.” He added, “This novel shows the extent to which literature, with its high freedom in examining reality and its emotional intensity, can draw, in addition to the historical story of a people, another path to memory.”
“Houris” is a dark novel whose heroine is the young woman Aub, who lost her ability to speak after being slaughtered. Daoud was keen to have a woman’s character be the narrator of the plot, and he chose for the beginning of the story the city of Oran, where he worked as a journalist during the “Black Decade”, and then the later takes place. In the Algerian desert, where Aub moves to return to her village.
This is the third novel by Kamal Daoud and the first published by Gallimard. He previously won the Landrno Readers’ Prize in October.
Daoud obtained French citizenship, and went so far as to say, in reference to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who was born in Poland and naturalized at the height of World War I, “I have Apollinaire syndrome, I am more French than the French.”
