Leila Slimani: The Scent of Flowers at Night
This event has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.
In a new work of non-fiction, the bestselling author of Lullaby, Leila Slimani, grapples with the self as it is revealed in solitude.
‘Night is the land of reinvention, whispered prayers, erotic passions. Night is the place where utopias have the scent of the possible, where we no longer feel constrained by petty reality. Night is the country of dreams where we discover that, in the secrecy of our heart, we are host to a multitude of voices and an infinity of worlds…’
Over one night, alone in the Punta della Dogana Museum in Venice, in a place of old and new, she confronts her past and her present, through her life as a Moroccan woman, as a writer, and as a daughter.
Surrounded by art, she explores what it means to behold and clasp beauty; enveloped by night, she confronts the meaning of life and death.
Leila Slimani is the author of Lullaby, 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 first novel, Adèle, about a sex-addicted woman in Paris, won the Mamounia Prize for the best book by a Moroccan author written in French and inspired her non-fiction book Sex and Lies: True Stories of Women’s Intimate Lives in the Arab World.
A journalist and frequent commentator on women’s and human rights, Slimani spearheaded a campaign – for which she won the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom – to help Moroccan women speak out against their country’s ‘unfair and obsolete laws’.
She is President Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture.
Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, she now lives in Lisbon with her French husband and their two young children. Her most recent novel is In The Country of Others, the first instalment of a planned trilogy fictionalising the author’s family history.
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For ages 16+
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Purcell Room
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