France’s high literary prize is now shadowed by a query with no straightforward reply: Whose life is truthful sport for fiction? In a sweeping investigation for the Guardian, journalist Madeleine Schwartz lays out the conflict between Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud—whose civil-war novel Houris received the 2024 Prix Goncourt—and Saâda Arbane, a little-known survivor of Islamist violence who says Daoud and his psychiatrist spouse turned her confidential remedy periods into his bestselling plot. Arbane, whose throat was slit in a 2000 bloodbath and who now breathes by a tube normally hidden by a shawl, factors to some 30 overlaps between her life and Daoud’s heroine, from uncommon medical particulars to a shared highschool and hair salon.
She is suing in Algeria and France for privateness violations and libel. Daoud, in the meantime, insists the novel’s character Aube is “pure fiction” and portrays the case as a political operation by an authoritarian Algerian state he criticizes and may not safely go to. Schwartz makes use of the dispute to probe bigger points: consent, affected person confidentiality, the possession of traumatic tales, and the way fraught Franco-Algerian politics can swallow one girl’s voice. Learn the total piece within the Guardian to see the proof, the authorized stakes, and the questions it raises for writers in all places.
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