Kamel Daoud’s novel Houris is the Prix Goncourt 2024 winner; the announcement was made in Paris, France on Monday, November 4, 2024
The Prix Goncourt is given by the French Académie Goncourt to the author of “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year”. While it only has a token prize of around 10 Euros, it can increase a book’s sales by up to 200,000 to its winner. Djaïli Amadou Amal made the shortlist in 2020, Leila Slimani won it in 2016, and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr won it in 2021.
The Goncourt Academy, chaired by Didier Decoin, is made up of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Pascal Bruckner, Paule Constant, Patrick Rambaud, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Camille Lauren, Françoise Chandernagor, Philippe Claudel, and Pierre Assouline. The first selection for 2024 was announcedon September 3, the second selection on Tuesday, October 1 and the finalists on October 22.
The winner was declared to by Houris a novel written from the point of view of a survivor of a massacre perpetrated by Islamists on December 31, 1999 by French-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud.
” With Houris, the Académie Goncourt crowns a book where lyricism competes with tragedy, and which gives voice to the suffering linked to a dark period in Algeria, that of women in particular. This novel shows how literature, in its high freedom of auscultation of reality, its emotional density, traces alongside the historical account of a people, another path of memory,” said Philippe Claudel during the announcement.
The book is banned in Algeria, as the country prohibits any work evoking this period of civil war. Indeed, “Houris” contravenes an article of the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation, which prohibits the evocation of the ‘wounds of the national tragedy’ – the expression used to describe the civil war that pitted Islamist groups against the Algerian army from 1992 to 2002, killing between 60,000 and 200,000 people and leaving thousands more missing.
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