Leila Slimani in conversation with Erin Lewenauer

Boswell Book Company and Alliance Française de Milwaukee present a special virtual event featuring Franco-Moroccan author and journalist Leila Slimani, whose bestselling novel The Perfect Nanny earned her France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt. Slimani will spend an afternoon hour in conversation about her new novel, Watch Us Dance.

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.

Please click here to register for this virtual event. 

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.

Erin Lewenauer works as a Director of Marketing & Cultural Engagement at l’Alliance Française de Milwaukee. She has degrees in English, French, and creative writing from Vassar College and the University of Pittsburgh and has the privilege of writing for Publisher’s Weekly and Rain Taxi, among other publications.