Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize longlist; and The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. The Moor’s Account was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her work appears regularly in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Guardian, and the New York Times. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. She lives in Santa Monica.

Photograph credit: April Rocha