The French-Moroccan novelist talks about her lifelong love of foreign literature - and why the International Booker Prize allows readers to interrogate both the past and the future
Leïla Slimani
International Booker Prize 2023 Judge (Chair)
- Prizes judged
Leïla Slimani is a prize-winning French-Moroccan novelist and journalist.
Slimani is the bestselling author of Lullaby (published in America as The Perfect Nanny), one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2018, for which she became the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.
Her first novel, Adèle, about a sex-addicted woman in Paris, won the Mamounia Prize for the best book by a Moroccan author written in French and inspired her non-fiction book Sex and Lies: True Stories of Women’s Intimate Lives in the Arab World.
A journalist and frequent commentator on women’s and human rights, Slimani spearheaded a campaign – for which she won the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom – to help Moroccan women speak out against their country’s ‘unfair and obsolete laws’.
She is President Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, she now lives in Lisbon with her French husband and their two young children. Her most recent novel is In The Country Of Others, the first instalment of a planned trilogy fictionalising the author’s family history.
