lOn November 4, Kamel Daoud won the Goncourt Prize for his novel. hourispublished by Gallimard. The most prestigious French literary prize will go for the first time to an Algerian writer, resident in France since 2023. About the work, which takes place during the “black decade” (1991-2002), a period of civil war among the Algerians between government and Islamist forces, Philippe Claudel, president of the Goncourt Academy, declared at the Drouant restaurant that he was showing “how much literature, in its high freedom of auscultation of reality, in its emotional density, traces, together with the historical story of a people, another path of memory.”
Kamel Daoud, born in 1970 in Mesra, in the Mostaganem region of northwestern Algeria, is a well-known figure in French public debate, often speaking on the question of secularism, Islam and Islamism. If you are a collaborator of Spot since 2014, he is also a regular on the pages of World. The story of his appearances paints the portrait of a man whose work is made of perpetual swings between reality and fiction, literature and journalism, France and Algeria…
The first time his name appeared in the evening newspaper, on February 6, 2003, there was already talk of the ambiguity of relations between the two countries. The then French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dominique de Villepin, has just inaugurated the Cultural Year of Algeria in France. In a joint forum, a dozen intellectuals and activists, including Danielle Mitterrand, president of the France Liberties Foundation, Robert Ménard, then secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, and Kamel Daoud, want to qualify the joy: “The Algeria that they want to present to us is a civilized Algeria, invented, a dream Algeria. The Algeria of flesh and blood, the mutilated, suffering Algeria, will remain hidden from us. they explain, after the “black decade.”
At that time a journalist from Oran newspaper, where he harshly criticizes President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Kamel Daoud becomes one of the voices of civil society appreciated by the world. On July 17, 2007, a few days after a visit by President Nicolas Sarkozy to Algeria, Florence Beaugé, a specialist in the Arab world, analyzes the strangeness of the (recent) good understanding between the two nations and cites this “young editorialist” who claims that Nicolas Sarkozy is “Perhaps a friend of Bouteflika, but not a friend of everyone and even less a friend of parents of immigrants or visa applicants”.
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