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Algeria escalates war on memory with sentence against novelist Kamal Daoud

Algerian authorities have sentenced French Algerian writer Kamel Daoud to three years in prison in absentia and fined him €35,000, in a ruling critics say epitomizes the regime’s sustained effort to suppress debate about the country’s civil war. Daoud, who won the 2024 Prix Goncourt for his novel Houris, announced the verdict on his X […]

Algeria Columns Headlines

Algeria’s war on writers is war on memory

In Algeria, literature is dangerous. Not because it incites violence or spreads falsehoods, but because it remembers what the regime wants to suppress. Writers who dare to revisit the regime’s authoritarian nature and the country’s darkest chapters- especially the current oppression and the bloody civil war of the 1990s- are silenced, exiled, or imprisoned. The […]