Moroccan-born Leila Slimani won France’s top literary prize, the Goncourt, on Thursday with a novel guaranteed to “scare the wits out of parents”.
The chilling tale of a “perfect” nanny who murders the two children she is looking after, Chanson douce (roughly translated as Sweet Song) is based on the real-life story of a Dominican child-minder shortly to stand trial for the double murder of her charges in New York in 2012.
The book —- which begins with the words “the baby is dead” — is already a bestseller in France.
A mother herself, 35-year-old Slimani, who caused a stir with her first book about a female nymphomaniac, said “the idea of paying someone to love your children for you” fascinated her. “It leads to a very ambiguous relationship... We are always afraid they will steal our place in our children’s hearts,” said the writer, who is pregnant with her second child.
“I had nannies when I was a child and I was always very aware of their place somewhere between a mother a stranger,” she told AFP.
“I was touched by the difficult position they found themselves in,” said the former journalist.
Slimani is only the 12th woman to have won the Goncourt in its more than a century-long history, joining a list that includes Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir.
Mobbed by reporters outside the Paris restaurant where the prize was announced, she said: “It is hard to talk about literature in this craziness.”
Despite being favourite, she said that she “slept well last night, maybe because it was going to turn out well”.
She dedicated the prize to her parents, “My father who died 10 years ago and my mother who arrived from Morocco this morning and had an intuition that I would win at 4am,” she added.
Critics said her book, which transposes the essentials of the notorious killings of the Krim children, Lucia, six, and her two-year-old brother Leo to a wealthy Parisian family, crackled with class tensions.
