American Launch of Watch Us Dance, Leïla Slimani’s Latest Novel

2023 Villa Albertine resident Leïla Slimani will discuss her latest book, Watch Us Dance (Penguin Random House), alongside her translator, Sam Taylor, and New Yorker journalist Parul Sehgal. 

The discussion will be followed by a Q&A session and book signings.

Watch Us Dance recounts the rebellions within an interracial family that play out against the countercultural rebellions of the 1960s in this sexy, stylish, sophisticated new novel by the award-winning, internationally bestselling author of The Perfect Nanny and In the Country of Others. Leïla Slimani draws on her family’s inspiring story to deliver a tense, provocative, page-turning novel about one family’s, and one country’s, coming of age in the face of the seductions of power and privilege.

Leïla Slimani is the bestselling author of The Perfect Nanny, 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 Goncourt. Her other books include Adèle, Sex and Lies, and the #1 international bestsellers In the 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. Leïla Slimani was selected by President Emmanuel Macron to be a personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture, and is the chair of the jury for the 2023 International Booker Prize. She 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 divides her time between France and Portugal.

Sam Taylor is a novelist and literary translator. In addition to the works of Leïla Slimani, he has translated more than sixty books from French, including Laurent Binet’s HHhH, Proust’s The Seventy-Five Folios, and Maylis de Kerangal’s The Heart, which won the French-American Translation Prize and the Lewis Galantière Prize. Born in Nottinghamshire, England, Sam was a writer and editor at The Observer for eight years before spending a decade in France, where he wrote four novels. His fifth novel, The Two Loves of Sophie Strom, will be published next year.

Parul Sehgal is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously, she was a book critic at the New York Times, where she also worked as a senior editor and columnist. She has won awards from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the New York Press Club, and the National Book Critics Circle for her criticism. She teaches in the graduate creative-writing program at New York University.