Laila Lalami

Pulitzer Prize Finalist

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 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the Booker Prize, and an Arab American Book Award winner. Her novel The Other Americans was a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. 

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.”

Her essays and criticism have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, The Guardian, and The New York Times, weighing in on borders, migration, identity, and Arab and Muslim diasporic experiences. She has received a Fulbright 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.