Leïla Slimani

Leïla Slimani (born in Rabat on 3 October 1981) is a French-Moroccan writer and journalist who writes in French. She is best known for Chanson douce, which won the Prix Goncourt in 2016, and her work has made her one of the most visible voices of French-language literature from the Maghreb.

She grew up in Rabat in a liberal, French-speaking household and attended French schools. Her father was an economist and banker, and her mother, an otolaryngologist, came from a family that was partly Alsatian and partly Moroccan. At seventeen she moved to Paris to study political science and media. After briefly trying acting, she turned to journalism and spent several years at the magazine Jeune Afrique, reporting on North Africa and the Arab Spring.

She left the magazine in 2012 to write full time. Her first novel, Dans le jardin de l'ogre (2014), deals with female sexual addiction and won the La Mamounia prize in Morocco. Its successor, Chanson douce, appeared two years later and follows the killing of two children by their nanny, sharpening a portrait of class tension in urban France. Her non-fiction, including Sexe et mensonges, gathers the testimonies of Moroccan women about intimate life, while Le Pays des autres begins a family trilogy that looks at Morocco's decolonisation through her maternal grandparents.

Her legacy lies both in her readership and in her public role. President Emmanuel Macron named her his personal representative to the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, and she chaired the judges of the International Booker Prize in 2023. Her books have been translated widely and have fed debates about colonial inheritance and the position of women in the Maghreb.