French-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud wins top French literary prize / Photo: © AFP
French-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud wins top French literary prize
French-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud on Monday won France's top literary prize, the Goncourt, for a novel centred on Algeria's civil war between the government and Islamists in the 1990s, organisers said.
The jury needed just one round of voting to award the coveted prize to Algeria-based Daoud for his novel "Houris" about what has become known as Algeria's "black decade".
Daoud's was already known internationally for his 2013 debut novel "The Meursault Investigation" -- a retelling of Albert Camus' "The Stranger" from the opposite angle -- for which he won the First Novel category of the Goncourt prize.
The writer, who has also worked as a journalist and columnist, has stirred controversy with his analyses of society in Algeria and elsewhere in the Arab world.
In 2016 -- following a mass sexual assault on women by Arab migrants in Cologne, Germany -- he wrote an op-ed piece published in the New York Times called "The Sexual Misery of the Arab World".
The prestigious Goncourt prize usually sparks book sales in the hundreds of thousands for the winning author.
Daoud's main rival for this year's edition was Gael Faye, a Rwandan-born writer, composer and rapper, whose novel "Jacaranda" deals with the rebuilding of Rwanda after the 1994 genocide.
While losing out on the Goncourt, Faye was Monday handed the Renaudot, another coveted prize awarded during the French literary competition season.
L.M. Del Campo--ESF
