Kamel Daoud Accused Of Plagiarism After Winning The Prix Goncourt

Every November, the leading figures of French literature gather in Paris, upstairs in an old-style restaurant, surrounded by luxury food and wine, and decide who will receive the country’s biggest literary prize.

The winner of the prize known as the Goncourt is seen as a candidate to enter a world-literature pantheon that includes writers like Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir. The award also brings serious financial impact. Goncourt means front-row bookstore placement, foreign publishing rights, and prestige.

In November 2024, the Académie Goncourt gave the prize to a novel by Kamel Daoud, a prominent Algerian writer living in France. This victory landed during a period of rising tension between France and its former colony. Daoud was already known in both countries, but he moved to France in 2023, saying that in Algeria he could neither “write” nor “breathe.” Daoud’s French publisher Gallimard was barred from attending the 2024 Algiers Book Fair because it published Daoud’s latest novel, Houris.

Houris tackled a long-controversial subject: Algeria’s civil war, or the “Black Decade.” Throughout the 1990s, this conflict between the government and armed Islamist groups produced an uncertain death toll, with some estimates rising as high as 200,000. Across the country, civilians were massacred, and many of these attacks were later claimed by Islamist groups.

This period is still a sensitive topic to discuss. In 1999, a law was passed granting legal amnesty to Islamist militants who laid down their arms. In 2005, a reconciliation law expanded that amnesty. The chapter was closed without many wrongdoers ever paying a price.

The Black Decade is still not taught in Algerian schools.

Houris was not published in Algeria, and the story is told through Aube, a 26-year-old woman. Aube survived a massacre as a child in the village of Had Chekala, where a real massacre took place in January 1998. In the novel, terrorists kill Aube’s family and slash her throat. The attack leaves a large scar on her neck, what she calls her “smile.” To breathe, Aube undergoes a tracheostomy, meaning her neck is opened to access her airway. She wears a cannula, sometimes hiding it with a scarf. “I always choose a rare and expensive fabric,” she says. But because of the wounds from the attack, even twenty years later her voice has become almost inaudible. For her, the scar is a mark of a history many people want to forget. “The real trace of everything we lived through in Algeria for ten years, the most concrete proof, is me,” she says. The novel begins in 2018. Aube is pregnant with a baby girl and calls her “houri,” a name associated in Muslim tradition with the virgins of paradise. While considering an abortion, she returns to the place where the massacre happened. The novel is shaped as an internal monologue between Aube and her unborn child.

The French prize committee praised Daoud for giving voice to “a dark period of Algerian history,” and especially for speaking to the suffering women experienced.

Eleven days after the Goncourt ceremony, a woman appeared on a news program in Algeria. She was wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt, her long hair tied in a bun. That left her neck exposed, and a breathing device connected to a cannula was visible. Just like in the book, there was a deep cut scar on her throat. She introduced herself as Saâda Arbane, 30 years old. Daoud, she said, had stolen her personal details to write his bestselling novel. “This is my private life, my story. The only person who can decide how it becomes public is me.” For twenty-five years, she said, “I hid my story, I hid my face. I don’t want people pointing at me.” But Arbane claimed she had told her story in full detail only to her psychiatrist. And her psychiatrist was Kamel Daoud’s wife.

Arbane is now suing Daoud in both Algeria and France, through different cases that approach his conduct from two angles. In Algeria, her case focuses on her medical records allegedly being used without consent. In France, she is suing Daoud and Gallimard for violation of privacy and defamation. Daoud argues there is no basis to these claims and says his work draws on many stories from Algeria’s Black Decade. He also claims that behind these lawsuits, in reality, stands the Algerian government.

In France, where news about Algeria is closely followed, these cases have been pulled into broader questions about history, colonialism, and international relations.

The lawsuit against Daoud touches a set of questions that make the literary world uneasy:

Who does a story belong to, the one who lived it, or the one who writes it? When you tell a wound, are you giving it language, or opening it again?