Conversation with Leïla Slimani


Les Rencontres Culturelles de l'Alliance |  2021

Conversation with Leïla Slimani

Virtual event with Alliance Française de Seattle in partnership with Elliott Bay Book Company


Join the Alliance Française de Seattle and Elliott Bay Book Company for an exclusive conversation with bestselling author Leïla Slimani, who will discuss her latest book In the Country of Others (Le Pays des Autres). AFSeattle instructor Aimie Shaw, PhD, will lead this virtual discussion.

Virtual event, in English, held via Zoom.
Please RSVP below to receive the Zoom link.

Attendees will receive a complimentary copy of the book after the event—offered by AFSeattle.
(Please note that guests must attend the virtual event in order to receive a book).

This program is supported by STAFE (Dispositif de soutien au tissu associatif des Français à l’étranger).


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leïla Slimani is the bestselling author of The Perfect Nanny, a Goncourt Prize winner and one of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year, as well as Adèle, for which she won the La Mamounia Prize. A journalist and frequent commentator on women's and human rights, she spearheaded a campaign—for which she won the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women's Freedom—to help Moroccan women speak out, as self-declared outlaws, against their country's "unfair and obsolete laws." She is French president Emmanuel Macron's personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture and was ranked #2 on Vanity Fair France's annual list of The Fifty Most Influential French People in the World. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, she now lives in Paris with her French husband and their two young children.

ABOUT THE BOOK: IN THE COUNTRY OF OTHERS (Le Pays des autres)

The world of men is just like the world of botany. In the end, one species dominates another. One day, the orange will win out over the lemon, or vice versa, and the tree will once again produce fruit that people can eat.

In her first new novel since The Perfect Nanny launched her onto the world stage and won her acclaim for her “devastatingly perceptive character studies” (The New York Times Book Review), Leïla Slimani draws on her own family’s inspiring story for the first volume in a planned trilogy about race, resilience, and women’s empowerment.

Mathilde, a spirited young Frenchwoman, falls in love with Amine, a handsome Moroccan soldier in the French army during World War II. After the war, the couple settles in Morocco. While Amine tries to cultivate his family farm’s rocky terrain, Mathilde feels her vitality sapped by the isolation, the harsh climate, the lack of money, and the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner. As tensions mount between the Moroccans and the French colonists, Amine finds himself caught in the crossfire: in solidarity with his Moroccan workers yet also a landowner, despised by the French yet married to a Frenchwoman, and proud of his wife’s resolve but ashamed by her refusal to be subjugated. All of them live in the country of others–especially the women, forced to live in the land of men–and with this novel, Leïla Slimani issues the first salvo in their emancipation.


Please include your shipping address to receive the book after the event (US shipping only).


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