Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami is distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account (Pantheon, 2014), which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans (Pantheon, 2019), was a national bestseller, the winner of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.

While at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Lalami is working on “The Dream Hotel.” Set in a near future without privacy, the novel follows a museum archivist who gets detained by government agents after an algorithm determines she is a potential criminal.

Lalami holds a license ès lettres from Université Mohamed V de Rabat, a master’s degree in linguistics from University College London, and a PhD in linguistics from the University of Southern California. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Guardian, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She lives in Los Angeles.