"French history is a history of writers who have always been welcomed, since Apollinaire, since Kundera," says Kamel Daoud at a press conference in the Drouant restaurant, after winning the Prix Goncourt 2024, France's most prestigious literary prize, for “Houris”, a fictional account of the massacres of the “black decade” in Algeria. The Franco-Algerian writer, whose outspokenness eventually forced him to leave his hometown of Oran for Paris and take French nationality, says he knows ‘the price of freedom’, which ‘makes it possible to write’ and ‘to be free’. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES