The French-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud has been awarded the French literary prize Goncourt for his book “Houris” on the massacres of Algeria’s “black decade” (1992-2002), the Académie Goncourt announced.

Kamel Daoud, 54, is a critical Algerian chronicler. His free spirit and speech forced him to leave his hometown of Oran and move against his will to Paris.

The Goncourt Prize-winning novel was not published in Algeria, nor was it translated into Arabic.

As the author notes in the book, Algerian law prohibits any mention in a book of the bloody black decade, the civil war between the government and Islamists from 1992 to 2002.

In Algeria “they attack me because I am neither a communist, nor a patent anti-colonialist, nor anti-French,” Kamel Daoud said in August in the Point magazine where he chronicles.

The Franco-Algerian writer, who has taken French citizenship, said, referring to Guillaume Apollinaire, who was of Polish origin and became a French citizen during World War I: “I have the Apollinaire syndrome, I am more French than the French ».

In the view of a large part of Algerian public opinion and intellectuals, he cannot throw off the label of traitor to his country.

But many Algerians, on the other hand, admire his writing, his knowledge of his country’s history and his persistence in asking disturbing questions. And the first first is the publisher Sofiane Hadjadj, of Barzakh editions who released in 2013 “Meursault, contre-enquête”, (Meursault, the other stranger). “He invented his own way of writing,” he commented at the time.

The son of a gendarme, Kamel Daoud was born in Mostaghanem in June 1970 and is the eldest of six children. He was raised by his grandparents in a village, of which he became an imam during his teenage years. He moved towards the Islamists before turning away from the religion.

He studied Literature and turned to journalism. He was first employed at Détective, an Algerian magazine with a variety of content, and then at the large French-language newspaper Quotidien d’Oran.

As he explained during the promotion of “Houris”, journalist positions were freed up after the wave of murders. The profession was dangerous and difficult: you had to give accounts of massacres that neither wanted to hide, underestimate or overestimate.

His reputation for integrity was established during this period. With his articles and vignettes, he bitterly denounced what was consuming Algerian society: corruption, religious hypocrisy, neglect of power, violence, regression, inequalities.

A father of two, he stopped journalism in 2016, when literature won the battle.