Skip to main content

Laila Lalami

Biography

Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain and the United States. She the author of four novels, including THE MOOR'S ACCOUNT, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent work, THE OTHER AMERICANS, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, The Guardian and The New York Times. Lalami is a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles.

Laila Lalami

Books by Laila Lalami

by Laila Lalami - Dystopian, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Sara has just landed at LAX when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for 21 days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

by Laila Lalami - Essays, Memoir, Nonfiction

Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using her own story as a starting point for an exploration of the rights, liberties and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship. Tapping into history, politics and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth --- such as national origin, race and gender --- that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today, poignantly illustrating how white supremacy survives through adaptation and legislation. Weaving together her experiences with an examination of the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture, Lalami illuminates how conditional citizens are all those whom America embraces with one arm and pushes away with the other.

by Laila Lalami - Fiction, Mystery

Late one spring night in California, Driss Guerraoui --- father, husband, business owner, Moroccan immigrant --- is hit and killed by a speeding car. The aftermath of his death brings together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter, Nora, a jazz composer returning to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; her mother, Maryam, who still pines for her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, an old friend of Nora’s and an Iraqi War veteran; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son’s secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself. As these characters tell their stories, connections among them emerge.

by Laila Lalami - Fiction, Historical Fiction

In 1527, a crew of six hundred men sailed from Spain, intending to claim for the Spanish crown what is now the Gulf Coast of the United States. Within a year there were only four survivors, including the slave, Estebanico. After six years of enslavement by Native Americans, the four men escaped and wandered through what is now Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The Moor's Account brilliantly captures Estebanico's voice and vision, showing how, contrary to popular belief, black men played a significant part in New World exploration