Leïla Slimani

Leïla Slimani is a French-Moroccan author and journalist born in 1981 in Rabat, Morocco. She studied at Sciences Po Paris and the École supérieure du commerce de Paris before turning to writing. She worked as a journalist for the magazine Jeune Afrique before publishing her debut novel Dans le jardin de l'ogre in 2014. Her second novel, Chanson douce (Lullaby / The Perfect Nanny), won the Prix Goncourt in 2016 and became an international bestseller, translated into more than forty languages. The novel opens with the murder of two children by their nanny and works backward to examine class, intimacy, and the hidden lives of domestic workers. Slimani has been France's personal representative for Francophone affairs under President Macron and is a prominent public voice on issues of feminism, identity, and the relationship between France and the Maghreb. Her subsequent works include Sexe et mensonges (Sex and Lies, 2017), a nonfiction work on female sexuality in Morocco. She is one of the most internationally recognized French writers of her generation, with her work widely translated and adapted for film and television.