Daoud wins top French literary prize for novel on Algeria’s civil war

Kamel Daoud became the first author of Algerian origin to win the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary prize.

Daoud was awarded the accolade for Houris, a novel based on Algeria’s bloody civil war between Islamist militias and the country’s army in the 1990s.

The coveted prize usually catapults writers to fame in France and leads to hundreds of thousands of book sales — though Houris itself is banned in Algeria, according to AFP.

“This prize has a lot of meaning,” Daoud told Le Monde: “It’s a strong signal for budding Algerian writers, those writers who are terrorized by certain political currents, who are destroyed in the cradle and who are afraid to write.”