Acclaimed author Kamel Daoud is facing two international arrest warrants issued by Algeria over claims he used a woman’s personal story in his novel Houris. A separate civil case is underway in France.
Franco-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud, who is the subject of two international arrest warrants from Algeria and a legal complaint in France, called the legal actions against him “a form of judicial persecution” in an interview with the French daily Le Figaro on Monday.
Daoud, who won the 2024 Goncourt Prize, also described the legal saga as “a way of trapping me in a procedural maze.”
Algerian authorities issued the arrest warrants for both Daoud and his wife, a psychiatrist, seeking to prosecute them for allegedly violating the privacy of an Algerian woman who claims her life story was used—without consent—in the novel Houris.
That woman, Saâda Arbane, is a survivor of a massacre during Algeria’s “Black Decade” of civil war in the 1990s.
“I’m not trying to censor a writer,” Arbane told AFP on Sunday. “I’m trying to have serious and very real harm acknowledged.”
Upon learning of the arrest warrants, Daoud’s lawyer said he would challenge them through Interpol.
In addition to the criminal proceedings in Algeria, a civil case based on the same claims is ongoing in Paris. An initial procedural hearing took place last Wednesday, with the next session scheduled for September 10.
In an interview with France Inter last December, Daoud said, “Everyone knows this story in Algeria, especially in Oran. It’s a public story.”
He added: “The fact that she sees herself in a novel that doesn’t name her, doesn’t tell her story, and doesn’t include personal details—I’m sorry, but that’s not grounds for this kind of claim.”
Houris—named for the maidens of paradise in Islamic belief—is a dark novel set partly in Oran. It follows the tragic fate of Aube, a young woman rendered mute after an Islamist militant slit her throat on December 31, 1999.
The book cannot be published in Algeria due to a law banning literature about the Black Decade, a civil war that lasted from 1992 to 2002 and officially claimed over 200,000 lives.
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