Giving Shape to the World with Leïla Slimani
- Event type
- Seminar
- Address
- Institut français du Royaume-Uni, 17 Queensberry Place, London SW7 2DT
- Speakers
- Leïla Slimani (), Adina Stroia ()
- Event dates
- Contact
- modernlanguages@sas.ac.uk .
First Franco-Moroccan woman to win the prestigious Prix Goncourt for her novel Lullaby, Leïla Slimani was appointed personal representative of President Macron to the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie. She will discuss how literature and art shape our world with Dr Adina Stroia (Newcastle University).
Leïla Slimani is a Franco-Moroccan writer and author of the Goncourt prize-winning Chanson douce (2016) and other award-winning works such as Dans le jardin de l’ogre (2014), Sexe et Mensonges: La Vie Sexuelle au Maroc (2017) and Le pays des autres (2020), which has recently been translated and published in English as The Country of Others (2021). Slimani’s latest book, Regardez-nous danser: Le pays des autres, 2 is out with Editions Gallimard in February 2022. In 2017, she took up the position of personal representative to the ‘Organisation internationale de la Francophonie’ on behalf of the French President, Emmanuel Macron.
Adina Stroia is Lecturer in French/Francophone Studies at Newcastle University. Her research interests lie in the areas of life-writing, visual culture, ageing, mourning, queer theory and vulnerability studies. She has most recently published ‘The Traumatic Structure of the récit de mort: Camille Laurens’s Philippe’ in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies and a chapter entitled ‘Visualizing Mourning: The Legacy of Roland Barthes’s La Chambre claire’ is forthcoming in Dwelling on Grief: Narratives of Mourning Across Time and Forms (Oxford: Legenda, 2022). She has interviewed several high-profile contemporary authors, including Annie Ernaux, Camille Laurens, and Marie Nimier.
This event is organised as part of a series of seminars taking place in 2022 and supported by the UK Association for Modern and Contemporary France’s Visiting Scholars’ Seminar Series fund, the Cassal Endowment Fund and the Institute of Modern Languages Research at the University of London.
Giving Shape to the World: Contemporary Writing in French Today is a series of conversations bringing together several new voices in French and Francophone writing, visual arts and poetry with academic centres of research in the UK interested in the broad question of the relationship between writing, the visual arts, translation and world-making. By focusing on a series of forms, from the realist to the experimental novel, from experimental poetry to the visual form of the bande dessinée or graphic novel, from texts tackling issues ranging from social violence to colonial history, to the role of the translator in rendering literary and visual form across languages, the series sheds light on the increasing predominance of narratives and forms of world-making in French and Francophone literature and visual arts.
The series is co-convened by Dr Sarah Arens (University of Liverpool), Dr Jeff Barda (University of Manchester), Dr Joseph Ford (Institute of Modern Languages Research) and Professor Jean-Michel Gouvard (Université Bordeaux-Montaigne).
This event will be held in person at the Institut français du Royaume-Uni. To register, please click on the Book Now button below
