On hope and rebellion, racism and corruption, power and privilege.

This event will take place in the British Library Entrance Hall. It will be simultaneously live streamed on the British Library platform. Tickets may be booked either to attend in person (physical) or to watch on our platform (online) either live or within 48 hours on catch up. Viewing links for the online version will be sent out shortly before the event.

An evening with one of the leading literary voices of our time, Leïla Slimani, who comes to the British Library to discuss her latest novel Watch Us Dance, the second part of a trilogy of novels based on her family’s roots in revolutionary Morocco. Leïla talks to writer and broadcaster Bonnie Greer, who came of age in Chicago during the Civil Rights Movement. 

In the follow up to the best selling In the Country of Others, the rebellions within an interracial family play out against the countercultural rebellions of the 1960s. Of two siblings, one is studious and aspires to become a doctor; the other falls in with the American and European hippies descending en masse on Tangier and Casablanca. Both are dreaming of radiant futures in a newly independent Morocco, but find the ideals of their youth colliding with the realities of racism and corruption, power and privilege.

Followed by a book signing.

Leïla Slimani is the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, which she won for Lullaby. Her other books include Adèle, Sex and Lies, and In the Country of Others and Watch Us Dance and a new non-fiction work The Scent of Flowers at Night. A journalist and frequent commentator on women’s and human rights, she is also the Chair of the International Booker Prize 2023 judges. Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1981, Leïla now lives in Portugal. 

Bonnie Greer is an American-British playwright, novelist, critic and broadcaster. She was born on the South Side of Chicago and began writing plays at the age of nine, later studying theatre in Chicago under David Mamet’s supervision at the Actors Studio in New York. Living in Manhattan’s West Village in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she moved to Britain in 1986. Bonnie has often appeared on television programmes such as Newsnight Review and Question Time and has served on the boards of several leading arts organisations. Her numerous books and novels including a biography of writer and social activist Langston Hughes, and explorations of the lives of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald and a memoir, Parallel Life.

If you’re attending in person, please arrive no later than 15 minutes before the start time of this event.

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