Author of Acclaimed Novel Sued by a War Survivor

France's top literary prize is now shadowed by a question with no easy answer: Whose life is fair game for fiction? In a sweeping investigation for the Guardian, journalist Madeleine Schwartz lays out the clash between Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud—whose civil-war novel Houris won the 2024 Prix Goncourt—and Saâda Arbane, a little-known survivor of Islamist violence who says Daoud and his psychiatrist wife turned her confidential therapy sessions into his bestselling plot. Arbane, whose throat was slit in a 2000 massacre and who now breathes through a tube usually hidden by a scarf, points to some 30 overlaps between her life and Daoud's heroine, from rare medical details to a shared high school and hair salon.

She is suing in Algeria and France for privacy violations and libel. Daoud, meanwhile, 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 can no longer safely visit. Schwartz uses the dispute to probe larger issues: consent, patient confidentiality, the ownership of traumatic stories, and how fraught Franco-Algerian politics can swallow one woman's voice. Read the full piece in the Guardian to see the evidence, the legal stakes, and the questions it raises for writers everywhere.