Leïla Slimani

Leïla Slimani (b. 1981, Rabat, Morocco) is a French-Moroccan novelist and journalist who lives in Paris. She studied at Sciences Po and has worked as a journalist for Jeune Afrique. She is the personal representative of the French President for the Francophonie.

Her debut novel, Dans le jardin de l'ogre (Gallimard, 2014), addressed female sexual addiction and its social consequences. Her second novel, Chanson douce (Gallimard, 2016), opens with the murder of two children by their Parisian nanny and proceeds in reverse to examine the domestic and social pressures that produced the act. It received the Prix Goncourt in 2016, has been translated into more than forty languages, and was adapted for film by Lucie Borleteau in 2019 under the title Chanson douce. Slimani has since published Sexe et mensonges: La vie sexuelle au Maroc (Les Arènes, 2017), a sociological essay based on interviews with Moroccan women; and the trilogy Le Pays des autres (Gallimard, 2020, Prix Landerneau; Regardez-nous danser, 2022; Leur enfant, 2024), a multigenerational saga set across Morocco and France from 1944 to the present, following a Franco-Moroccan family through the colonial period and its aftermath. She is one of the most internationally read French-language novelists of her generation.