Laila Lalami

Born and raised in Morocco, Laila Lalami is a novelist and essayist who is particularly interested in race and immigration. Her “spare elegant prose” (says Junot Díaz) often confronts questions of race, displacement, and national identity. Her first book, a collection of short stories called Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, is about a group of immigrants attempting to escape Morocco for a better life in Europe. Her first novel, Secret Son, is about a shy young man living in a slum in Casablanca who discovers that his father is a wealthy businessman. Her second novel, The Moor’s Account, imagines the life of the first black explorer of America: a Moroccan slave called Estebanico, who joins a doomed Spanish expedition to Florida. Four survivors (three Spaniards and Estebanico) live with American tribes for six years before escaping and wandering through what is now Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona; Lalami gives Estebanico a voice in The Moor’s Account, which Salman Rushdie has called “an absorbing story of…a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history.”

The Moor’s Account was the University of Portland’s 2016 ReadUP selection.