This event is part of Letters Home, our series of curated programs celebrating the many ways we imagine, remember, and return to home from afar.
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Bestselling French-Moroccan novelist and the American Library’s Fall 2026 Cultural Fellow, Leïla Slimani inaugurates the Library’s Letters Home programming theme with a conversation on writing, memory, identity, and the intersections of family and colonial history.
In her latest novel, I’ll Take the Fire, the concluding volume of her family trilogy, Slimani follows a young Moroccan woman forging a life between Casablanca, Paris, and London as she grapples with freedom, inheritance, and belonging.
Moderated by the Library’s Curator of Cultural Programs, Rachel Donadio, the conversation explores the stories we inherit, the places we call home, and the ways personal histories are shaped by larger political and colonial legacies.
About the speaker:
Leïla Slimani is the bestselling author of The Perfect Nanny (Chanson Douce), 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 other books include Adèle, Sex and Lies, Country of Others and Watch Us Dance, which are the first and second parts of a trilogy of novels based on her family’s roots in revolutionary Morocco. Slimani is French president Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture. She has received numerous honors for her literary and cultural contributions, including the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom, and was the chair of the jury for the 2023 International Booker Prize. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, she divides her time between France and Portugal.
