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Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor's Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; was on the longlist for the Booker Prize; and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Lalami's writing appears regularly in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper's, The Guardian, and The New York Times. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles. Read Laila's guest blog at BookBrowse.
Laila Lalami's website
This bio was last updated on 02/25/2025. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
What is your new novel, The Dream Hotel, about?
The Dream Hotel is set in Los Angeles in the near future. Sara leads what is by all appearances an ordinary life; she works at a local museum, has a husband and twin toddlers, and spends her free time hiking or backpacking. But one day, on her return home from a conference in London, agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside.
Using data from her dreams, the RAA's algorithm has determined that Sara is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents quickly 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 petty rules of the facility, their stay is extended.
How would you describe the Risk Assessment Administration you imagined in this novel?
The RAA was founded after a particularly awful mass shooting, with a goal of stopping crime before it happens. And the way it does this is by collecting all kinds of data (legal, financial, residential, reputational, etc.) and using algorithms to assign every American a crime-risk score. So, a score...
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