Culture Society, Identity and Belonging
Kamel Daoud is the first Algerian author to win France’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt.
But he faces two legal complaints alleging that his winning novel, Houris, tells someone’s real story without consent and allegedly violates medical confidentiality; and that he learned of it through his wife, who is also the survivor’s psychiatrist.
The novel depicts a young woman who loses her voice after an Islamist cuts her throat during Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s. Saada Arbane told Algerian TV that the book mirrors traumatic experiences that she shared in psychiatry sessions with the author’s wife, Aicha Dahdouh.
These include details of her assault, her injuries, the tube she now uses to speak, her tattoos and her relationship with her mother.
In Algeria, the couple is accused of violating medical confidentiality and breaching the law on national reconciliation, which bans all publications on the civil war.
They haven’t commented yet, but Daoud’s publisher claims the novel’s plot and characters are “purely fictitious”.
