Leïla Slimani

Leila Slimani writes, “To set ourselves free and become who we are, we had to find an ‘elsewhere’ where we could reinvent ourselves”. The daughter of a Moroccan banker and an Alsatian doctor, she settled in France in 1999, where she tried her hand at acting, studied Political Science and worked for the prominent pan-African magazine Jeune Afrique. Turning from journalism to writing novels in 2013 was her way of repositioning herself against her family history, her Maghreb roots and her gender, always with a sense of shame and sorrow for never writing in Arabic. In 2016, she was the first Moroccan woman to win the prestigious Prix Goncourt for Lullaby (published in the US as The Perfect Nanny), a novel equal parts thriller and psychological portrait exploring power relations, class conflict and cultural prejudice in modern Paris. The book became a bestseller, selling 600,000 copies in France in 2017 alone. In her 2023 work The Country of Others, she sets an intense family saga against the rich tapestry of Morocco after the Second World War, when the country was fighting for independence from French colonial rule. She has also written essays on sexuality, stereotypes and prejudices against feminism, collected in 2017 in the book The Devil is in the Detail and Other Writings, which focuses on intercultural dialogue. When faced with accusations of selling out to the West, she is not afraid to remind people that the homosexuals and adulteresses languishing in the prisons of King Mohammed VI are real people serving real sentences.