This year’s winner of France’s biggest book prize is being sued in Algeria over claims he stole the story from a patient for his psychiatrist wife.

Kamel Daoud was awarded the Goncourt prize earlier this month for his novel Hourisa searing account of Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s in which up to 200,000 people were killed.

But a woman who survived one of the massacres has appeared on Algerian television and claimed that the book’s heroine – named Fajr – is based on her own personal story.

As a girl, Saada Arbane had her throat slit in an Islamist militant attack that wiped out most of her family and now communicates through a speaking tube. In the book, Fajr has suffered the same fate.

Arbane said that from 2015 she had several psychiatric sessions with Daoud’s future wife, Aicha Dahdouh, and she accused the couple of using her story without her consent.

She said many details of the heroine’s life — “her mouthpiece, her scars, her tattoos, her hairdo” — came directly from what she told Dahdouh. Likewise, she said, Fajr’s relationship with her mother and her desire for an abortion.

Arbane claimed she responded to an invitation to meet Daoud three years ago, but declined when he asked if he could use her story as the basis for his book.

“It’s my life. It’s my past. He had no right to throw me out like that,” she told Algeria One TV.

Two lawsuits have been filed in Algeria against Daoud and his wife.

Reference is made to rules on medical confidentiality. The other cites a law passed after the end of the Civil War that makes it a crime to “instrumentalize the wounds of national tragedy.”

This “reconciliation” law severely restricts the right to publish or speak publicly about the civil war, and is why Daoud’s book has been banned in his home country and why his French publisher Gallimard was banned from the recent book fair in Algiers.

Daoud, who moved to Paris in 2020 and took French nationality, is a controversial figure in Algeria, where he is accused by some of selling out to the former colonial power.

He is the first Algerian to win the Goncourt main prize. An earlier work The Meursault investigation won the award for best first novel in 2015.

Daoud has yet to respond to the lawsuit, although the BBC has contacted the author for comment.

Antoine Gallimard, of the publisher, said the author was made “the target of a campaign of violent defamation organized by some media close to the Algerian government.

“Houris was certainly inspired by the tragic events that happened in Algeria … but its plot, its characters and its heroine are purely fictional.”

The trials against Daoud and his wife were made public in Algeria on Wednesday by lawyer Fatima Benbraham, a woman described by Le Monde newspaper as a “zealous supporter of the regime”.

She said the lawsuit was filed in August, shortly after the book’s publication, but was only disclosed now “because the plaintiffs did not want it to be said that they were trying to upset (the book’s) nomination for Goncourt.”

The row comes at a time of heightened tensions between Algeria and France, sparked by President Emmanuel Macron’s recent recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed territory of Western Sahara.

Algeria is the historical backer of the Polisario independence movement.

Macron’s move outraged many Algerians, who see the award to Daoud as a political rather than a literary gesture.

Another award-winning French-based Algerian writer, Boualem Sansal, was reported on Thursday to have disappeared in Algeria, with fears that he has been arrested.

Sansal, 75, was granted French citizenship earlier this year but regularly returned to Algeria. He is known as a critic of the Algerian regime as well as of Islamism.

He flew to Algiers from Paris last Saturday. His editor Jean-François Colosimo said he has not been heard from since.

“I’m more than concerned,” Colosimo said.