Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose work explores belonging, migration, and the meaning of citizenship. Born and raised in Morocco, educated in Great Britain, and now based in California, she brings a transnational perspective to questions of identity and displacement. She is the author of six acclaimed books, including The Moor’s Account, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and winner of the Arab American Book Award, and The Other Americans, a finalist for the National Book Award and named one of Time’s 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time.

Her most recent novel, The Dream Hotel, imagines a near-future world of pervasive surveillance, probing the boundaries between privacy, technology, and freedom. Her nonfiction work, Conditional Citizens, examines how national origin, race, and gender continue to shape notions of Americanness; it was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Lalami’s essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, and The Guardian. A graduate of Université Mohammed-V in Rabat, University College London, and the University of Southern California, where she earned her PhD in Linguistics, she has received fellowships from Fulbright, Guggenheim, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

She is currently Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and speaks widely on borders, migration, identity, and the Arab and Muslim diasporic experiences. Laila is at work on her next novel.