in thailand is now heading to australia where he has refugee status. hakeem al—araibi had been convicted in his absence of vandalising a police station. he denied the charges and was fighting extradition in thailand where he was travelling on his honeymoon. the much anticipated trial of the former malaysian prime minister najib razak for alleged money laundering has been postponed. it was due to begin on tuesday. mr najib‘s lawyers have succeeded in getting the trial delayed on a technicality. and this video is trending on bbc.com. russia is considering whether to disconnect temporarily from the global internet as part of a test of its cyber—defences. the experiment is set to take place before the end of march. that's all. stay with bbc news. now on bbc news, hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk.

i'm sarah montague. france's president macron gave my guest today the job of promoting french language and culture around the world. she is one of the most famous french authors, despite only having written two novels. one of them, lullaby, a story of infanticide, was a publishing sensation and has been translated into a0 languages. the other, adele, has shocked readers for breaking taboos about women and sex addiction. what draws her to such a dark vision of femininity? and what difference can she make to the way france and its language are viewed around the world? welcome to hardtalk.

thank you. now, your novel adele which is being published for the first time in english, is about a woman addicted to sex and we're talking about sex in which she goes in search of — cold, brutal, they are encounters. were you setting out to shock? not at all. when you're writing a book you're not like, 0k, i'm going to shock my readers and i'm going to write about a taboo. no, you just want to explore the soul of someone and try to understand a character, someone who is mysterious, someone who fascinates you. and adele was fascinating me so ijust tried to understand her and i was hoping that maybe my reader would feel some empathy for her. but it's quite hard to feel empathy for her because she's not a particularly nice character.

no, she's not nice but she's suffering and she doesn't understand herself, she tries to figure it out why she is acting like she is acting but she doesn't know. i think that she's completely lost and very lonely. so feeling empathy doesn't mean that you're going to like someone but that you're going to recognise the fact that he is a human being and that he is a suffering like you can suffer. ok, but she's not a typical female role in the book. no. i mean, were you setting out to subvert stereotypes? no, but you know, i remember my father told me when i was a teenager — one day will people will recognise that women have as many flaws as men and that day we will be equal. when people recognise that women have dark side, like men. the fact that we always want women to be nice, gentle and soft, i think that it's a tool to dominate them and to put them in a box, and i think it's very important to explore also our flaws and dark sides.

0k, and she certainly has some. i mean, she's not nice and gentle and soft in any way, and yet she's also a mother. it's an interesting mix but a mix that i suppose in part you set out to explore as well. yeah, she's a mother, she's a wife, she's a journalist. and in a certain way, she has it all. but she's disappointed by all that because i suppose that everyone told her, you know, you should marry and have a child and have a good job and a nice apartment in paris and you will be happy. i think that she discovers that she is not, and she finds her husband boring, she finds motherhood tedious and very difficult and she finds that herjob as a journalist is not that interesting. she's very lazy, too, anotherflaw. i think she's looking for something else, she wanted more. i wanted also to ask this question, a lot of women want more but they don't dare to say or express the fact that they want more than a husband,

a child and a job. i have two ask you because she, like you, was a failed actress—turned—journalist who has a child and it's a remarkable situation to you. yeah, but i chose literature instead of sex addiction, and that's how i wanted more and i had more. but i think that maybe if she had a passion like i have, she would probably not be in the situation she's in. and you talk about the freedom. when you give life, having a child, there's also something that dies in you. you are in grief for something in your past, you feel a certain nostalgia for the woman you were before. is that how you felt when having a child? yeah, that's how i felt. i felt that something new was beginning, something wonderful, and of course i loved my son but i must say that the first feeling i had when i looked at my son for the first time was not love, it was fear. fear that something could happen

to him and fear of the fact that someone was depending on me and that i would never be alone again. and that i would never be able to be completely selfish again, someone was counting on me and that was terrible for me. when adele came out, the response in morocco i think surprised you, because of the conversations it opened up with women. yeah, a lot of women came to me and talked to me about their sexual life, their intimacy. and a lot of them told me, you know, i identify to adele because she lies all the time and as a moroccan woman i lie all the time, because you know, in morocco, sexual intercourse is forbidden when you're not married, homosexually is forbidden, abortion is forbidden, so a lot of women have to lie when it comes to sexual topics. and your family are from morocco? yeah yeah, and i was born and raised in morocco, in rabat. so were you surprised by the things they were saying? yes, i was surprised by the things

they were saying and i was surprised by the fact that they wanted so much to speak out and i was surprised by the fact that the more you speak, the more you conquer your dignity. in the beginning, the women, they were speaking like this and the more they spoke to me and the more they were standing up and looking at me in the eyes and i could feel that the fact they were saying "i" and telling me their story was helping them to heal and to feel that maybe their story counts. right, which has prompted you to put an essay together... exactly. ..of what had been said to you and your response to it. but also, on this question of freedom, you talk about freedom in our arab world is torture if not a tragedy. and that's because of the effects of a woman if she chooses to be free. yeah, you know, as a lot of people, i was an idealist and i thought

that everyone and every human being wants to be free and for me it was like obvious. it is inevitable. but it's not, actually, a lot of people prefer security to freedom or money to freedom and it's very difficult to choose to be free because you must be able to sacrifice a lot if you choose to be free. and also, i think it's particularly difficult for women because you are educated as a woman to be a giver and to take care of others, your children, your parents, and to be able to sacrifice yourself as a mother for your children so when you choose to be free, you have to choose also choose to disappoint people and sometimes to be selfish to do just what you want to do and it's very difficult i think. but there's another layer in morocco which you've explored which is this idea that actually, if you choose to be free, for example, in your sexual relations, you are then outcast from your society. yes, you are a pariah,

you are marginalised, that's for sure, and you are very lonely. what was very, very sad is that i told four women who chose to be free and at the end i said i admire you so much, you're so brave and they said no, i'm not not brave and to be honest, i regret what i did. if i had to redo it, i wouldn't do the same and i wouldn't choose to be free because it wasn't worth it. do you blame islamic society for that or what are the reasons for that? is there a connection to islam, can you have that sort of freedom for women in an islamic society? i wouldn't say with islam, i would say with religion. becuase i think that any religious society is very hard towards individual rights. it's the same in some regions in the us, it is the same in ireland, you saw it with abortion and things like this. so it's not only islam, it's religion. but any form of religion is incompatible with freedom for women? yeah, i think.

which says what about the arabic world? it says that we have to debate and to evolve on those questions, of course, on those questions, but i think that there is an evolution. if you see the condition of my grandmother or my mother and mine, it's very different, i have much more rights than my grandmother had and it was like 15 years ago. but you're living in france though? yes, i'm living in france, but it doesn't mean that i don't know what life is like in morocco and my mother lives in morocco. and when you go back, you would have the same freedoms in morocco? yes, of course. now let's turn to your other book lullaby, which was a publishing sensation, it won the prix goncourt, france's most prestigious literary prize. sold a huge amount. you were inspired by a story in new york of a nanny who killed the two children in her care. why take that on? actually, i was not inspired by this story, i was writing the book when i discovered the story.

i was writing the book about a nanny coming into a family. so i wrote like 100—150 pages and sent it to my publisher and he said, yes, i like the idea, but the book is a little bit boring. it's always the same. you have to find something to put some tension in the narrative so the reader wants to read the book. and one day i was reading the newspaper and i read about this crime in new york. and i began to research about different kind of crimes like this, and there was a crime also in strasbourg, and i discovered also the louise woodward case, this british nanny that went to the us, and so i had the idea to begin the book with the murder of the children. 0k, and what it's been praised for is, in a sense, depicting modern mothering, an examination of what it's doing to society. the idea that in a sense you're outsourcing something that is an intimate relationship, commodified in it. yeah, but in a certain way,

you wouldn't ask this question for a man because it's very natural that a man is going to outsource this, either to his wife or a nanny. but for a woman, you always feel guilty to outsource this as though it was your duty to take care of your children and you don't see the same, the thing in the same way for men. so no, i wanted to ask the question, is it possible to have it all? because i belong to a generation of women to whom our mothers said you can have it all, you can have a job, you can have children, marry or not marry, you can do whatever you want, you are free women. but the day we have everything, we get contrast that it's very, very difficult to be at the same time a good mother, a good professional, a good individual. but the message of this story is it's not possible, your children are murdered. there is no message in the story. literature is not here to give message, it's just a story. so can you have it all? i think so, yeah. i have it all. so despite what seems

to be suggested here... it's just a story, you know, it's not because one nanny killed two children that every nanny is going to kill children and actually, in real life, the big majority of nannies are wonderful women who help you to be at the same time a mother and a professional. it's not because of that that every nannies are killers. and so, the outsourcing is necessary if you want... yeah, i think so, i think that everyone needs help and it's not a shame to ask for help. and the other thing you do with this book, again, this subverting of stereotypes which i imagine you deliberately set out to do. where the mum is actually north african, the nanny is white. was that a— i don't know, i mean, had you even thought about that? yeah, it was a little bit ironic, of course. i think it's sad and very cliched that in every book or in every movie immigrants are victims and white

people are dominant. and it's not true. actually now in france you have a lot of immigrants, especially from north africa, who are dominant and who are employees and who have a nanny and who have maids. so i thought it was interesting and although i think that for louise, she is white and she is the only white nanny. and she's doing a job of immigrants — when she goes to the park, all the other nannies come from africa, from maghreb or philippines, so she feels very lonely and she feels humiliated, i think, by the fact that she's doing a job of an immigrant because louise is a little bit racist. so it was interesting to for to build a character who is very, very lonely. now, your editorjean—marie laclavetine, said, "under the simplicity of her writing, the efficiency of her narration, there is something dark and this darkness is the enormous ineffaceable trauma of the injustice that was caused to her father to which i believe she now

dedicates every day and every moment of her life." yeah, i suppose he's right, but not in a sad way. i think it gave me a lot of strength and i want my father, wherever he is, to be proud of me. because we should explain what happened to your father. he was morocco‘s economy minister in the late ‘70s and then chief executive of a moroccan bank. but then there was a financial scandal and he was indicted for embezzlement and misappropriation, he was imprisoned, and it was only after he died that he was posthumously acquitted of all charges. yeah, exactly. do you feel that you still need to right that wrong? you mean to write about this story? well, perhaps. i will, i will, of course. and it would probably be the most important book of my life. but, you know, what's weird is that

i never investigated this case before, i never tried to understand, i never asked questions about that, because it was so hard just to experience that. and i don't want to bother my mother with that. but i think that in some years, i will work on it and try to write something about my father, yeah. you said "it was the end of my childhood: all of a sudden i realised this whole wonderful little world, this well—oiled mechanism, was in the midst of falling apart." yeah, but at the same time, that was, um... in a certain way i was lucky, because i discovered a part of morocco that probably i would never have discovered if my father wasn't in prison. i discovered prison and injustice and the violence of the government and the violence of politics in morocco. so i think that maybe that i felt empathy, also, for the situation of a lot of moroccan people and i think that i'mprobably not the one who suffered

the most in my country, that a lot of people suffered more than i did. now you're in a situation where, as a result of the success of your books, you were approached, i think initially, to become the french minister of culture, is that true? yes. but you turned it down, and took on the role instead of promoting the french language and culture overseas, an ambassador to the french—speaking world. but you take it on at a time when the president, the man who gives you the job, says "french'll be the first language of africa and perhaps of the world if we know how to do it in the coming decades. let's take this challenge together, let us be conquerors, let's be ambitious. " do you agree with him, that french should be the first language of the world? yes, why not? but i don't think that it's aggressive or that we want to impose french on people. that's the exact contrary, that's the opposite. what i want, what i expect, is that so many people will fall in love with this wonderful language and will want to learn french and will want

to speak french. you know, when you go to africa, the french language is very different, of course, in rabat, in tunis, or in bamako or dakar. people speak different languages with different expressions in metaphor and poetry. it's wonderful to hear that, and now new artists in those countries try to promote this french language, and i think it's wonderful. you'll know there was immediately, there was some suspicion, some irritation, some anger at this idea. the congolese writer alain mabanckou said, "i think francophonie operates as a form of colonial control", and he talks about, "the organisation never challenges african dictators who manipulate constitutions or rig elections. france still welcomes these dictators. the organisation never criticises systems that date to our so—called independence." and he criticises it as "a neo—colonial situation and it's time to expose it." yeah, but he's totally right,

i completely agree with him. what, the control by france? yeah, and i think that's exactly why emmanuel macron chose me. because i completely agree with alain mabanckou, who is a great friend of mine and helps me a lot in my work, because i think that we have to change that, that this organisation is too old and it has to renew itself, the french language should not now be imposed to populations, that it's exactly the contrary. that it's now the national population who should embrace this french language and make it ours and possess it. so, yeah, i think that what he's saying is completely right. so there isn't a conflict between what president macron is saying on the one hand, about conquering the world with french and the culture, and you saying no, there should be, it should take... no, because emmanuel macron, when he was for instance at academie francaise, he said we don't own french language. french language is not french, french language is moroccan,

french language is senegalese, it's cambodian, so that's what is interesting. it's not ours, it's not french. but there is more recently criticism from italy's deputy prime minister, luigi di maio, who's said "france has never stopped colonising tens of african states." he said the eu should sanction france and all countries like france that "impoverish africa and make these people leave, because africa should be in africa, not at the bottom of the mediterranean. " yeah, you know, i think i wouldn't comment on this man, what he's saying, because i think that what he says is completely stupid and irrelevant in general. and he's not a man i want to comment on. because he's wrong? he's wrong in so many ways, in so many ways, not only in what he says about france but in everything, i think. but there is — i mean, he's not alone in criticising france over its approach to africa. we've had, there are a number of people, quartz africa: "despite the rhetoric, macron is not

about to loosen france's paternalistic grip in africa." but you know that i'm not involved in macron‘s politics in africa. because you are asking as if i was involved in this politics. but that's quite interesting, because i know as well, you are not involved in his politics, and you are critical, you have been openly critical of his approach to a comment about immigration, because you said he could have defended it with more force and coldness, when somebody was saying that people should be sent out of france. so you are quite critical of the president's policies? no, just i say what i think. i'm not — i don't belong to a cohort, and i'm not herejust to say that i'm 0k with everything. when i'm outraged or scandalised about something, i think it's very important to speak out. and i think also that now in europe, the way that we treat immigrants is so outraging and so terrible that

we as intellectuals, and all the human beings, should speak out, because one day we will regret that we hadn't. because what? because of the violence, in hungary, even in germany, in poland, everywhere of the extreme right against immigrants, i think it's very important to defend our dignity and our right to be respected. do you see that as part of your role? something you can do with your role as ambassador? no, with my role as a human being, that's it. i don't think it belongs to my role as an ambassador. it's just me as a citizen. i think it's important to say that. to do what? and to do what? to say, look, on the one hand... to write, because i'm a writer. that's my onlyjob, i'm a writer. so i use my pen and a piece of paper and i try to write when i think that something is wrong. right. now, the— one of the things of course that france has seen over the last six months is the rise of the gilet jaunes. there's a suggestion that actually, those are people who are putting

on yellow vests, effectively saying, "you can't ignore me", this is the effect of a difference between those who would wear the yellow vests and the elite. do you think — do you agree with that? do you have sympathy with that position? in france, we call them les invisibles, the invisibles. even as a writer, i have always been very interested in the invisibles, people that we don't look at, people that we don't respect, that we ignore. and i think that not only in france, but in many countries of the western world, a lot of people feel that they are ignored and they can't live with dignity. and of course, it's very important that they can speak out and they can ask for help and for change. so when the mp francois ruffin, who is one of the few political figures of the movement, says, "anger‘s going to derage, the pride of the president of the republic, his deafness, his obstinacy, his lack of concessions are a machine of hatred",

and he says "he must leave before making our country crazy", do you have any sympathy with that view? no, no, idon‘t. because i don't have sympathy with violence, and i don't have sympathy with political manipulation, the fact that they try to use a movement to win elections and to be in the front of the spectacle, i don't like that. i think that we should alljust try to understand the situation in its complexity, without violence and without trying to be the star of this thing. leila slimani, thank you for coming on hardtalk. thank you. hello there.

we may well be heading towards the final few weeks of winter now, but actually, the weather is feeling almost springlike, some slightly milder conditions certainly on the cards over the next few days. this was the scene taken near eastbourne by one of our weather watchers on monday. some blue sky, a bit of sunshine around too. now, as we head through the course of the next few days, still quite a lot of dry weather, there'll be a little rain across northern and western parts of the uk. things turning mild by day, but we've still got a few chilly nights to come, could be the odd spot of frost and perhaps a bit of mistiness around too. but you can see the yellow colours moving in from the south—west gradually over the next couple of days, introducing that milder air. the blue colours, the colder air, kept at bay for now. so, through tuesday morning then, it will be quite a chilly start across much of england and wales, particularly in the south and the east. we've got more cloud from the word go further north and west. a few spots of rain for parts of northern england, but also for scotland and for northern ireland as well, as a frontal system just moves its way gradually south—eastwards through the day.

it should brighten up for scotland and for northern ireland during the afternoon, as those south—westerly winds help to break up the cloud. a bit of rain lingering for northwest england, but central, southern and eastern england should stay dry through the day. now, temperatures up to between around ten to 13 degrees, so a little above—average really for this time of year. now, as we move through tuesday night and on into wednesday, high pressure sits towards the south. we've still got this frontal system, which is just pushing its way gradually further northeastwards moving on into wednesday morning, so through the day on wednesday, still quite cloudy across northern western parts of the uk. a few spots of rain, particularly for parts of scotland, england and wales certainly staying dry through the day and there will be a bit more sunshine on wednesday, i think, compared to tuesday. so temperatures will be doing reasonably well again, around ten to 13 degrees or so, could see 14 celsius in the warmest spot. so, we've got that milder air with us into the start of the week, with high pressure sitting across the continent.

we're drawing in these southwesterly winds, they stay with us into thursday as well, as weather fronts clear off to the north. so i think thursday not a bad day, should be quite a fair amount especially across england, northern ireland, wales, one or two showers for scotland, especially in the far north. but a largely dry today, and with those southerly winds, again temperatures will be up again in double figures after a bit of chilly start, 12 or 13 the warmer spots on thursday afternoon. looking towards the end of the week then, and we keep that mild theme to the weather, but it will turn a little bit more unsettled towards the end of the week as those winds strengthen, with some rain particularly in the north and west at times. bye for now. i'm rico hizon in singapore, the headlines: heading home — the bahraini footballer freed from a thai jail will soon arrive in australia where he has refugee status. a malaysian court postpones the trial of former prime minister najib razak, who's facing multiples charges of corruption. i'm kasia madera in london.

also in the programme: president trump heads to texas to rally support for his border wall as the threat of another government shutdown looms. small creatures, big problem — why the threat of insect extinction could have catastrophic results for us all.