Kamel Daoud

Kamel Daoud is an Algerian-French novelist and journalist born in 1970 in Mostaganem, Algeria. He worked for many years as a journalist and columnist for the Algerian newspaper Le Quotidien d'Oran, where his provocative commentary made him one of the most prominent voices in Algerian public debate. He was the subject of a fatwa in 2014. His debut novel Meursault, contre-enquête (The Meursault Investigation, 2013) is a reworking of Camus's L'Étranger told from the perspective of the brother of the nameless Arab killed by Meursault. Published in Algeria in 2013 and in France in 2014, it won the Prix Goncourt du premier roman and was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt. It became an international sensation. Houris, his 2024 Prix Goncourt winner, is a novel set during and after the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s, a decade of extreme violence known as 'la décennie noire' (the black decade). The novel was controversial in Algeria and banned there, but in France it was celebrated as a major work of witness fiction. Daoud is one of the most important voices in contemporary Francophone literature and a writer of great courage and literary ambition.