Kamel Daoud

Kamel Daoud (born June 17, 1970, Mostaganem, Algeria) is an Algerian writer and journalist who won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman for his novel Meursault, contre-enquête (2013; The Meursault Investigation).

Daoud, the eldest of six children, was born into an Arabic-speaking Muslim family in Algeria. As a teenager he embraced the emerging Islamic movement during the early 1980s, but he became disillusioned and openly opposed to religious fervour. He later was outspoken in his criticism of contemporary Algerian society and rejected the tenets of what he saw as misguided nationalism and Islamism that denied self-expression and intellectual freedom. After having studied French literature at the University of Oran, Daoud decided on a career as a writer. He established himself as a journalist, and in 1996 he became affiliated with Le Quotidien d’Oran, a French-language newspaper, to which he contributed a regular column under the title “Raina Raikoum” (“My Opinion, Your Opinion”). He published a selection of his commentary in 2002, followed by the novellas La Fable du nain (2003; “The Fable of the Dwarf”) and Ô Pharaon (2004; “Pharaoh”). In 2008 he released La Préface du nègre (“The Preface of the Negro”), a collection of short stories that was republished in 2011 as Le Minotaure 504.

In 2013 Daoud published his debut novel, Meursault, contre-enquête, which was conceived as a fictional “counterinvestigation” or retelling of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger). Narrated by the imagined brother of the nameless “Arab” senselessly murdered by the detached and dispassionate Meursault, Daoud’s novel presents a dual portrait of the human condition as envisioned by Camus and reenvisioned by Daoud. In addition to the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, the work also received the Prix François Mauriac and the Prix des Cinq Continents for Francophone writing (both 2014). However, the novel was not without controversy. Offended by the narrator’s vehement rebuke of religion in Meursault, contre-enquête, Islamists voiced outrage, denounced the work as blasphemy, and demanded retribution. In 2014 a fatwa, or religious decree, was issued by a radical Salafist imam in Algeria who deemed Daoud an “apostate” and an “enemy” of Islam.