Writing

Leïla Slimani

Leïla Slimani (born 3 October 1981) is a Franco-Moroccan writer and journalist. She is also a French diplomat in her capacity as the personal representative of the French president Emmanuel Macron to the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. In 2016 she was awarded the Prix Goncourt for her novel Chanson douce. Slimani's maternal grandmother Anne Dhobb (née Ruetsch, born 1921) grew up in Alsace. In 1944, she met her future husband Lakhdar Dhobb, a Moroccan colonel in the French Colonial Army, during the liberation of France. After the war she followed him back to Morocco, where they lived in Meknes. Her autobiographical novel was published in 2003; she became the first writer in the family. Her daughter - Slimani's mother - is Béatrice-Najat Dhobb-Slimani, an otolaryngologist, who married the French-educated Moroccan economist Othman Slimani. The couple had three daughters; Leïla Slimani is the middle one. Leïla was born in Rabat on 3 October 1981; she grew up in a liberal, French-speaking household and attended French schools. An important rupture in Slimani's childhood occurred in 1993 when her father was falsely implicated in a finance scandal and fired from his position as president of the CIH Bank (he was later officially exonerated.) Slimani left Morocco at the age of 17 for Paris to study political science and media studies at the Sciences Po and ESCP Europe. After her graduation, she temporarily considered a career as an actress, completing an acting course and appearing in supporting roles in two films. She married her husband, a Parisian banker whom she first met in 2005, on 24 April 2008 and started to work as a journalist for the magazine Jeune Afrique in October of that year. The work required much travel. After her son was born in 2011 and she was arrested in Tunisia while reporting on the Arab Spring, she decided to quit her job at Jeune Afrique to pursue freelance work and write a novel instead. The novel, however, was rejected by publishers. In 2013, Slimani took a writing workshop by Jean-Marie Laclavetine, a novelist and editor at Gallimard. He took an interest in Slimani's writing and helped her improve her style; in 2014, Slimani published her first novel Dans le jardin de l’ogre ("In the Garden of the Ogre" - in English translation, "Adèle") with Gallimard. The novel fared well with French critics and received the La Mamounia literary award in Morocco. Two years later she followed up with the psychological thriller Chanson douce, which won the Prix Goncourt and turned her into a literary star in France, and made her known to international audiences as well. In 2017, her second child, a daughter, was born.