Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami

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Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami (Arabic: ???? ?????? , born 1968) is a Moroccan American author 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 she went on to complete a M.A. in Linguistics at University College London. After graduating she returned to Morocco and worked as a journalist for the French-language newspaper Al Bayane, where she covered political and cultural events, and wrote a weekly column. In 1992 she moved to Los Angeles and later received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California.

Lalami switched to writing 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, and elsewhere.

She became the first Moroccan author to publish a book of fiction with a major commercial press in the United States.^[1] Her debut collection of stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was released in the fall of 2005 and has since been translated into five languages.

Lalami is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts grant and a Fulbright Fellowship to research her new novel in Morocco. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.