Leaving, finally, to write, again. In the summer of 2023, Kamel Daoud finally decided to leave his first country, Algeria, for his second, France, which naturalized him in 2020. Oran carries the wind, heading for Paris. “You don’t write a book without a feeling of freedom. Dictatorship starts in the stomach like a cramp,” he says. Ten years after “Meursault, contre-enquête” (Goncourt for the first novel), his second novel, “Houris”, an intimate fresco of the Algerian civil war of the 90s, has just been awarded the Transfuge magazine prize.
