Leila Slimani: A City Arts Literary Salon
Prix Goncourt laureate Leila Slimani discusses her fiction — identity, immigration, postcolonial complexity, and the moral ambiguity that defines her work.
Why we picked this
Slimani writes about the violence that lives inside domestic life and postcolonial identity with an unflinching clarity that makes her one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary European literature.
Leila Slimani won the Prix Goncourt in 2016 for Lullaby — a novel that opens with two dead children and then methodically explains how it happened, refusing both sensationalism and easy judgment. The book became an international phenomenon and established her as one of France’s most important contemporary writers. Her subsequent The Country of Others trilogy traces a French-Moroccan family across postcolonial history with the same moral seriousness.
Born in Morocco and raised between Rabat and Paris, Slimani writes from a position that is itself the subject of her fiction: the hyphen between cultures, the instability of belonging, the particular pressures that fall on women navigating multiple expectations. Her work has been compared to Flaubert for its precision and to Toni Morrison for its willingness to inhabit darkness without resolving it.
A literary salon format at Sydney Goldstein suggests an evening built for conversation — Slimani is a precise and interesting thinker in the room, not just on the page.