Leïla Slimani

Leïla Slimani (born 1981) is a French-Moroccan novelist and journalist who became the first Moroccan woman to win France's Prix Goncourt, for *The Perfect Nanny* (Chanson douce, 2016). Born in Rabat to a Moroccan banker father and French-Algerian mother, she studied at Sciences Po Paris and worked as a journalist at the magazine Jeune Afrique. Her debut novel *Adèle* (2014) — about a woman's sex addiction — explored female desire and social performance in contemporary France. *The Perfect Nanny* (2016), which opens with a nanny murdering the two children in her care, became the bestselling book in France that year. In 2017 French President Emmanuel Macron appointed her as France's personal representative for Francophone affairs. She has also published a non-fiction investigation of sexuality and hypocrisy in Morocco, *Sex and Lies* (2017). Leïla Slimani lived b. 1981.