[4] An important rupture in Slimani's childhood occurred in 1993 when her father was falsely implicated in a finance scandal and fired from his position as president of the CIH Bank (he was later officially exonerated.

She married her husband, a Parisian banker, Antoine d’Engremont, whom she first met in 2005, on 24 April 2008 and started to work as a journalist for the magazine Jeune Afrique in October of that year.

After her son was born in 2011 and she was arrested in Tunisia while reporting on the Arab Spring, she decided to quit her job at Jeune Afrique to pursue freelance work and write a novel instead.

[7] Two years later she followed up with the psychological thriller Chanson douce, which won the Prix Goncourt and turned her into a literary star in France, and made her known to international audiences as well.

[13] On 6 November 2017 the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, appointed Leila Slimani his personal representative to the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.

[2][3] Slimani's first novel Dans le jardin de l’ogre, published in English as Adèle, tells the story of a woman who loses control of her life due to her sexual addiction.

The novel starts off with the immediate aftermath of the murder with the opening line of "The baby is dead",[16] and then recounts the backstory of the parents, a liberal, upper middle class Parisian couple, as well as their nanny, who is economically and psychologically struggling.

"The country of the others" (at Gallimard, 2020), a first novel in a trilogy about the writer's own family, deals with the life of Slimani's maternal grandparents during Morocco's period of decolonisation in the 1950s.

[20] La baie de Dakhla : itinérance enchantée entre mer et désert describes a region of Morocco on the Atlantic where people are going through a period of transition between traditional life and modernity.