Having lost his mother and been shunned by his father, Zabor grows up in the company of books, which teach him a new language. Ever since he can remember, he has been convinced that he has a gift: if he writes, he will stave off death; those captured in the sentences of his notebooks will live longer. Like a kind of inverted Scheherazade saving his fellow men, he experiments night after night with the delirious power of the imagination. Then, one night, his estranged half brother and the other relatives who would disown him come knocking at the door: his father is going to die and perhaps only Zabor is capable of delaying that fateful moment. Sitting next to the father who has ostracized him, the son writes compulsively, retracing an existence characterized by strangeness, abandonment, and humiliation, but also by wondrous encounters with fictional worlds that he alone in the entire village can access.
Author
Né en 1970 à Mostaganem, Kamel Daoud est journaliste au Quotidien d’Oran où il tient une chronique à succès « Raïna raïkoum ». Il est l’auteur de plusieurs ouvrages dont le recueil de nouvelles La Préface du nègre ( barzakh, 2008 ) récompensé par le Prix Mohammed Dib et traduit en allemand ainsi qu’en italien. __________________________ The Algerian writer and journalist, Kamel Daoud is the winner of the edition 2014 of the Five Continents Prize. This was the decision of the jury chaired by the Nobel Prize of literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Clézio on 26th September 2014 in Paris at the head office of the International Organization of the Francophonie. The novel “Meursault, The Counter-Inquiry” (Barzakh Editions in 2013) by the Algerian author sends readers back to the post-colonial realities. The novel “Meursault, The Counter-Inquiry” by the writer, Kamel Daoud will unmistakably mark the African literature As “The Stranger” by Albert Camus that strongly inspired the author. Prize-winner of the François Mauriac Literature Prize 2014, the work just made its author win the famous of the Five Continents Prize. According to the official site of the International Organization of the Francophonie (OIF), the prize-winner will be honored on 28th November during the 15th OIF Summit that will be held in Dakar (Senegal). For the Nobel Prize of Literature Jean-Marie Gustave Clézio, “Meursault, Meursault, TheCounter-Inquiry” is “a novel that questions our historic blindness still topical and raises the question of justice and consideration of otherness once colonial terror calmed down“. Born on 17th June 1970, Kamel Daoud was a journalist then an editor-in-chief for “Quotidien d’ Oran” newspaper. Reputed for his freedom of writing, he is often obliged to share some of his opinions on social networks (Facebook particularly). On 14th November 2011, Kamel Daoud was nominated for the Wepler-Fondation La Poste Prize that finally went to Éric Laurrent. (Original text by: Roger ADZAFO)
