Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist and cultural critic, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Born in Rabat, Morocco, she studied English Literature at Mohammed V University before moving to the United States, where she earned a PhD in Linguistics from UCLA. The Moor's Account (2014) won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was the first novel by a Moroccan-American author to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It imagines the first-person narrative of Estebanico, a Moorish slave who was among the first Africans to explore North America as part of a Spanish expedition in the 1520s. The Other Americans (2019) won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize in 2019. This novel follows the intertwined stories of a Moroccan-American family in the Mojave Desert after a murder. Her most recent novel is The Dream Hotel (2024). Lalami is a cultural commentator for The Nation and has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the British Council, and the Fulbright program. She lives in Los Angeles.