Kamel Daoud

Kamel Daoud (b. 1970, Mostaganem, Algeria) is an Algerian novelist, essayist, and journalist who lives between Algeria and France. He worked for many years as a columnist for the Algerian daily Le Quotidien d'Oran, where his column Raina Raikoum made him one of the most widely read voices in Algerian public life, before facing repeated death threats and legal persecution for his writing.

His debut novel, Meursault, contre-enquête (2013; The Meursault Investigation, Actes Sud, 2014), retells Camus's L'Étranger from the perspective of the unnamed Arab killed in the original — giving the murdered man a name, a brother, and a voice. The book received the Prix François Mauriac and the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie, and was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt in 2015. It has been translated into more than forty languages. His subsequent novel, Zabor ou les psaumes (Actes Sud, 2017), received the Prix des libraires d'Algérie and further established his literary range. His most recent novel, Houris (Gallimard, 2024), about a survivor of the Algerian civil war of the 1990s — a decade during which an estimated 200,000 people were killed — received the Prix Goncourt in 2024. The book is banned in Algeria, whose law prohibits any literary treatment of that period's violence. Daoud is also the author of several essay collections, including Le Minotaure 504 and Mes indépendances. He is a regular contributor to Le Point and The New York Times.