This year’s winner of France’s biggest book prize is being sued in Algeria over claims he stole the story from a patient of his psychiatrist wife.
Kamel Daoud was awarded the Goncourt prize earlier this month for his novel Houris, a searing account of Algeria’s 1990s civil war in which up to 200,000 people were killed.
But a woman who survived one of the massacres has appeared on Algerian television, alleging that the book’s heroine – named Fajr – is based on her own personal story.
As a girl, Saada Arbane had her throat cut in an Islamist militant attack that wiped out most of her family, and now communicates through a speaking tube. In the book, Fajr has suffered the same fate.
Ms Arbane said that from 2015 she had several psychiatric sessions with Daoud’s future wife, Aicha Dahdouh, and she accused the couple of using her story without her consent.
She said that many details in the heroine’s life – “her speaking tube, her scars, her tattoos, her hairdresser” – came directly from what she told Ms Dahdouh. Likewise, she said, Fajr’s relationship with her mother and her desire for an abortion.
Ms Arbane alleged she answered an invitation to meet Daoud three years ago, but refused when he asked if he could use her story as the basis for his book.
“It’s my life. It’s my past. He had no right to chuck me out like that,“ she told Algeria One TV.
Two lawsuits have been filed in Algeria against Daoud and his wife.
One cites rules on medical confidentiality. The second cites a law enacted after the end of the civil war which makes it a crime to “instrumentalise the wounds of the national tragedy”.
This “reconciliation” law greatly restricts the right to publish or speak publicly on the civil war, and is the reason why Daoud’s book has been proscribed in his home country and why his French publisher Gallimard was banned from the recent Algiers book fair.
Daoud, who moved to Paris in 2020 and took French nationality, is a controversial figure in Algeria, where he is accused by some of selling out to the former colonial power.
He is the first Algerian to win the main Goncourt prize. An earlier work The Meursault Investigation won the best first novel award in 2015.
Daoud has yet to react to the lawsuit, although the BBC has approached the author for comment.
Antoine Gallimard, of the publishing firm, said that the writer was being made “the target of a campaign of violent defamation orchestrated by certain media close to the Algerian government.
“Houris was certainly inspired by the tragic events which happened in Algeria … but its plot, its characters and its heroine are purely fictional.”
The lawsuits against Daoud and his wife were made public in Algeria on Wednesday by lawyer Fatima Benbraham, a woman described by Le Monde newspaper as a “fervent supporter of the regime”.
She said the lawsuits were filed in August, shortly after the book’s publication, but were only revealed now “because the plaintiffs did not want it to be said that they were trying to upset the [book’s] nomination for the Goncourt.”
The row comes at a time of worsening tensions between Algeria and France, triggered by President Emmanuel Macron’s recent recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed territory of Western Sahara.
Algeria is the historic backer of the Polisario independence movement.
Macron’s move angered many Algerians, who view the award to Daoud as a political rather than a literary gesture.
Another award-winning French-based Algerian writer Boualel Sansal was on Thursday reported to have gone missing in Algeria, amid fears he has been arrested.
Sansal, 75, obtained French nationality earlier this year but returned regularly to Algeria. He is known as a critic of the Algerian regime as well as of Islamism.
He flew to Algiers from Paris on Saturday. His editor Jean-François Colosimo said he had not been heard from since then.
“I am more than worried,” Mr Colosimo said.
