The Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s early years as a journalist were particularly notable for his coverage of the country’s civil war—the so-called black decade that began in the early Nineties. He published his debut novel, The Meursault Investigation, in 2013, and now largely alternates between fiction and opinion columns that the critic Adam Shatz has described, in a 2015 New York Times Magazine profile, as “playful, lyrical, brash.” What distinguished all of Daoud’s work, Shatz wrote, was “the fearlessness with which he defended the cause of individual liberty.”

By the 2024 release of his novel Houris, Daoud had established himself as a prominent if polarizing figure in the French media and culture wars. Houris went on to win the Prix Goncourt, but shortly thereafter Daoud was sued for invasion of privacy by a woman named Saâda Arbane, who alleged that the novel relied heavily on her own biography and experiences as the survivor of an attack that left her orphaned and permanently scarred. The claim was bolstered by the fact that, more than a decade after the incident, Arbane sought the help of a psychiatrist, Aïcha Dahdouh, Daoud’s wife. 

For our September 2026 issue, Kyle Berlin considered the trial, its political context and principal figures, and its relation to the craft and reception of fiction writing generally. I spoke to Berlin recently about the novel and the varying responses to the scandal. 

Will Stephenson: Had you read Houris before it wound up at the center of this controversy? 

Kyle Berlin: I bought the book shortly after it came out in August 2024, and I remember being very excited to read it. It was Daoud’s first novel in more than a decade, and I had spent much of the previous year plunging into some of the contemporary classics of Algerian literature, by writers like Tahar Djaout and Boualem Sansal. Daoud has positioned himself as an heir to Camus (both were talented investigative journalists turned novelists) and I expected that Daoud’s marked skills as a reporter would serve him well in fiction. 

But my first attempt to read the book was a failure. I tried to get past the fifty-page mark or so and simply couldn’t make any headway. I don’t necessarily mind novels that meander or lack a clear narrative, but there was something else there that I was instinctively resistant to as a reader, and it wasn’t until I finished the reporting process that I figured out what it was.

Stephenson: When you initially proposed this piece, you brought up the perennial debates surrounding the question of fiction inspired by real events and the obligations that a writer may or may not have in those circumstances. Did the trial or its outcome ultimately add anything to your understanding of that conversation?

Berlin: Before the scandal broke, basically no one in the literary world seemed especially bothered that he was writing in the first-person from the perspective of a young woman who had been disfigured in a terrible attack that had killed most of her family. Just the opposite: It was considered daring and necessary, which shows how much had changed since his novel, The Meursault Investigation, was first published in French in 2013. Daoud’s career benefited from the literary world’s relatively narrow understanding of standpoint epistemology, but only so long as he remained primarily Algerian in the minds of his Western readers, rather than his other identity as a male writer who had made the long and difficult climb to international literary fame. 

I should note that Daoud himself is perfectly aware of this irony and wrote about it long before the scandal broke. Indeed, this was one of the central themes of his work: not the West’s inability to regard what Daoud refers to as the “so-called Arab world,” but rather the unstable categories—“terrorist,” “freedom fighter,” etc.—that usually say more about the categorizer than the categorized. In this way, for some on the left, at least, he passed from being a brave and vital voice of his people to a privileged, heartless victimizer of the oppressed. 

Stephenson: Have there been any updates in the trial since the publication of the piece? 

Berlin: The civil case here in France continues to drag on, and if the court rules in accordance with certain precedents, Saâda Arbane appears likely to win. I think that a ruling that granted her a substantial but not egregious sum—in the tens of thousands of euros, or even in the low six-figures, which is what her lawyers initially requested—would represent a just conclusion to this affair. It seems clear to me that Daoud used her story without her permission, and it seems right to me that he should pay for it. 

In Algeria, however, I found the criminal case being pursued against Daoud much more troubling. One of the epigraphs to Houris cites a passage in the reconciliation bill adopted after the official end of civil war hostilities that made it a crime to say anything that might besmirch the reputation of the Algerian state. (Such as, for instance, reporting on the many atrocities committed by the Algerian army against civilians during the civil war, as Daoud has done.) In April, Daoud was sentenced in absentia by a court in Oran to three years in prison for violating this exact statute—one of a number of moments in my reporting that seemed excessively overdetermined. If it happened in a novel, you would probably say it was too on the nose. 

Stephenson: Does it seem to you that the public response in Algeria has been notably different than that in France? 

Berlin: What was extraordinary were the efforts of the Algerian state to publicly promote Arbane’s story even though it was the kind of thing the reconciliation bill had been passed in order to bury. Algerian state media tried to square the circle by emphasizing the element of personal betrayal, as well as the violation of doctor-patient confidentiality on the part of Aïcha Dahdouh, who was Arbane’s longtime therapist. They remained silent, of course, concerning the specific circumstances of Saâda Arbane’s disfigurement, which was, nevertheless, unnervingly present in all of her onscreen interviews, as well as a press conference. The cannula she spoke through was a perfect symbol of the forced silence that ordinary Algerians continue to endure, as well as a textbook case of the return of the repressed.

Stephenson: I understand that it was difficult to speak to Arbane at length for the piece. Was there anything in your correspondence that you didn’t end up including but that has stuck with you?

Berlin: I submitted a long list of open-ended written questions to Arbane, in the hopes of getting a sense of who she was as a person outside of this media firestorm. It seems to me that people who come forward in the way she did are often required to present themselves as “perfect” victims, in a performance that involves, among other things, having infinite patience for repetitive and invasive questions from journalists. My idea was to break out of that by encouraging her to tell me about her daily life, her kids, her upbringing, etc. When she eventually responded, I was initially quite disappointed. Her responses were short and stayed very close to the public statements she had made previously. Many of the attempts I made to learn more about her personally were either rebuffed or ignored. 

After a week or so, however, I began to reconsider. I realized that the problem was with me, or rather the expectations I had developed after reading Houris, which is the story of a perfect victim, someone who has infinite patience with the invasive questions she is sure the reader (clearly a Western one) will want answered. This is what I felt to be false about the novel; someone who had suffered as Aube, the narrator, had suffered, would be unlikely to fill her narration with the penetrating sociological and cultural insights that she makes throughout the novel. These insights, and to me not coincidentally, mirror the ones you’ll find so eloquently expressed in Daoud’s columns. What made Houris right as history, in other words, made it wrong as fiction. The one thing that did stay with me from Arbane’s correspondence was this: “Je déteste la trahison” (“I hate betrayal”). Although her prose was not as brilliant as Daoud’s, I believed fully in the reality of every word she wrote.