Laila Lalami

Who is Laila Lalami?

Laila Lalami is a Moroccan American novelist and essayist.

Lalami was born and raised in Rabat, Morocco, where she earned her B.A. in English from Université Mohammed V. In 1991, she received a British Council fellowship to study in England and completed a M.A. in Linguistics at University College London. After graduating she returned to Morocco and worked briefly as a journalist and commentator. In 1992 she moved to Los Angeles where she earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California.

Lalami switched to writing fiction and nonfiction in English in 1996. She has published literary criticism and political essays in The Boston Globe, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere.

Lalami became the first Moroccan author to publish a book of fiction written in English with a major commercial press in the United States.

Her debut collection of stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was released in the fall of 2005 and has since been translated into six languages. Her first novel, Secret Son, was published in the spring of 2009 and was longlisted for the Orange Prize.