“This is a year of life taken from someone precious to us,” his friend Kamel Daoud reacted

Imprisoned for a year in Algeria, Boualem Sansal was released on Wednesday.

“It upsets me that this is still another year of incarceration, another year of life taken from someone precious to us.”reacted, Thursday, November 13 on France Inter, the French-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud, the day after the pardon of his friend and compatriot Boualem Sansal. He had been imprisoned for a year in Algeria and found himself at the heart of a diplomatic crisis between Algiers and Paris.

“This has been a year of misunderstandings and false problems that Algeria could have avoidedbelieves Kamel Daoud, It’s pointless in the end, so it’s annoying“, he added. “As an Algerian, I feel angry because my country fought for its freedom and freedom is a high value in Algeria.”continued the author, Goncourt Prize 2024. “This is not a country that imprisons writers,” he observed.

Through Boualem Sansal’s grace and release, Kamel Daoud saw “A wonderful opportunity for Algeria to calm down, loosen its ties with France and the rest of the world, and build something of its own”. Because “To calm the bond with your writer is to calm the bond with your children, to calm the bond with your imagination and its contradictions.”he believes. The author recalls that French journalist Christophe Gleizes, who was sentenced to seven years in prison at the end of June, is still in prison.

Boualem Sansal was arrested in November 2024 in Algeria, before being sentenced to five years in prison in March 2025, specifically for “undermining national unity”, for considering Algeria to have inherited French colonial territory that previously belonged to Morocco. After almost a year in prison, the French-Algerian writer was pardoned by Algeria and transferred to Berlin in Germany where he received medical treatment.