Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco, educated in Great Britain, and now lives and teaches in California, experiences that have inspired her award-winning work on belonging and displacement. Lauded for both her fiction and nonfiction, Lalami is the author of six books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the Arab American Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her essays and criticism have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, The Guardian, and The New York Times, weighing in on borders, migration, identity, and Arab and Muslim diasporic experiences.

In her fifth novel, The Dream Hotel, a woman fights for freedom in a near-future world where even dreams are under surveillance. An eerie exploration of the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier, the book asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are. Kirkus hailed the book in their starred review as “stellar… an engrossing and troubling dystopian tale” that “exposes the particular perniciousness of big tech’s capacity to exploit our every movement, indeed practically every thought.”

Lalami’s Conditional Citizens, a collection of essays that elucidate how accidents of birth – such as national origin, race, class, or gender – which once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today on a wide range of social and political issues. Using her own journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen as a starting point, she explores how the rights, liberties, and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship have expanded while preserving founding hierarchies. “Conditional citizens,” she argues, are all the people whom America embraces with one arm, and pushes away with the other. The book was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

The themes of xenophobia and belonging thread through Lalami’s earlier fiction as well. Her novel The Other Americans was awarded the Arab American Book Award, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, and Time listed it as one of 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time.  The story of a community grappling with the mysterious death of a Moroccan immigrant in a hit-and-run accident, the book brings together a diverse cast of characters whose invisible connections raise timeless questions about America’s legacy of assimilation and discrimination. Hailed as “a powerful novel of intolerance and compassion, resilience and weakness, love and loss” by The Economist, the novel won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, was a national bestseller, and was named a best book of the year by a dozen outlets, including The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Dallas Morning News, The Guardian, Variety, and Kirkus.

“Lalami skillfully limns the dark recesses of the Muslim world and creates true-to-life characters. With subtlety and grace [she] explores the emotional complexities of the culture they’re trying to escape—one that bears more resemblance to ours than we may imagine.”—People

The Moor’s Account, a historical novel that probes the violent and complex beginnings of exploration in America, was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. It imagines the real-life story of an enslaved Moroccan man, shipwrecked off the coast of Florida, who became the first Black explorer of America. Reza Aslan, New York Times bestselling author of Zealot and No God But God, calls it “a beautiful, rousing tale that would be difficult to believe if it were not actually true.” Salman Rushdie described The Moor’s Account as “an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadors and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth.”

Lalami’s first two novels take place in Morocco, a place whose past and present permeate her writing. Secret Son, longlisted for the Orange Prize, depicts contemporary Moroccan life in a way that the Los Angeles Times calls “sensitive and startling […] illuminating the social, political, religious and poverty issues facing its citizens.” Her first novel, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits is a collection of intimate character portraits of a group of immigrants trying to leave Morocco for a better life in Europe. As the refugee emergency continues to grow across the global south, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits remains devastatingly timely.

A graduate of Université Mohammed-V in Rabat, Lalami also attended University College London and the University of Southern California, where she earned her PhD in linguistics. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, and is currently a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California at Riverside.

Lalami speaks on literature, migration, and Arab and Muslim diasporic experiences. She also discusses identity and citizenship in the U.S., the malleability of history, and the transformative possibilities of speculative and historical fiction. She is at work on her next novel.

For more information on Laila Lalami, please visit her on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and at lailalalami.com.