Kamel Daoud
Convicted in absentia. Kamel Daoud, the Franco-Algerian writer whose novel Houris won the Prix Goncourt, was sentenced by a court in Oran, Algeria to five years in prison — his second criminal sentence connected to the same book. He denies the charges and denounces what he calls “a trial without defence or justice.”
Introduction
Kamel Daoud is a Franco-Algerian writer and journalist, winner of France’s most prestigious literary prize, who has been sentenced to five years in prison by an Algerian court over his award-winning novel Houris. The court in the western city of Oran handed down the sentence against Daoud and his wife, psychiatrist Aïcha Dahdouh, following a complaint filed by Saâda Arbane, who claims the couple used details of her personal history without her consent. Both were convicted in absentia of breaching professional confidentiality and invading privacy, and both were reportedly fined 300,000 Algerian dinars — approximately 2,000 euros each. Both live in France.
Background Information
Houris, published in 2024, won the Prix Goncourt — France’s top literary award — in November of that year. The novel tells the story of Aube, a young girl who miraculously survives a nighttime terrorist attack in her village of Had Chekala in western Algeria despite having her throat slit, and focuses on the victims of what Algerians call the “black decade,” when tens of thousands of people were killed as the army fought an Islamist insurgency during the country’s civil war. Arbane, the complainant, is a woman who survived an Islamist attack during that civil war in the 1990s, and she had previously been treated by Aicha Dahdouh, Daoud’s wife, a psychiatrist at Oran University Hospital and a specialist in trauma linked to violence during the civil war.
Arbane claims the couple used details of her personal history without her consent; since reading Houris, she has said she broke all contact with Dahdouh. Daoud has consistently denied using confidential medical information in writing the novel.
The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation
The controversy around Houris has followed the book from its publication. Arbane’s complaint set off a legal saga in Algeria that has now produced two criminal convictions for the author. In April 2026, an Algerian court handed Daoud a separate three-year prison sentence in another case connected to Houris; that earlier conviction, also reported internationally, was the first criminal consequence attached to the novel. The new sentence came on Tuesday, November 10, 2026, when the Oran court convicted both Daoud and Dahdouh in absentia of breaching professional confidentiality and invading privacy, according to the Algerian newspaper El Khabar, and sentenced each to five years with the fines on top. Reacting to the verdict on social media, Daoud denounced what he called “a trial without defence or justice.”
Public Reaction and Consequences
The sentence of a Goncourt-winning writer by an Algerian court reverberated through the French literary world, where Daoud is a regular presence in newspapers and literary debates. Daoud himself framed the case as political persecution, accusing the Algerian authorities of conducting “years of vicious smear campaigns designed to divert the Algerian people’s attention from their own hardships.” Because he and his wife live in France, the in-absentia convictions do not translate into immediate imprisonment, but they attach criminal records to one of the francophone world’s most prominent writers and to his psychiatrist wife, and leave both exposed to arrest should they return to Algeria.
Current Status
Daoud remains in France under a five-year Algerian prison sentence imposed in absentia on November 10, 2026, alongside the fine of roughly 2,000 euros, and under the earlier three-year sentence handed down in April 2026 in a related case. His wife Aïcha Dahdouh received the same five-year term and fine in the November ruling. Daoud denies the allegations, has denounced the proceedings, and faces the practical consequence that travel to Algeria — the country whose civil war his novel examines — now carries the risk of detention.
Impact on Their Career/Life
For a writer whose international standing rests on novels about Algeria’s trauma, being sentenced in absentia twice by Algerian courts is a form of exile made formal: the country at the center of his work is now a country where he is a convicted criminal. The Goncourt prize that crowned Houris in 2024 now sits beside two prison sentences — three years, then five — both connected to the same book, and to claims that its central story was taken from a real survivor’s life without her consent. Dahdouh’s conviction reaches into her own profession, attaching a finding of breaching professional confidentiality to a psychiatrist whose field is treating the very trauma the novel revisits.