Laila Lalami likes being an outsider. Born and brought up in Morocco, she had no intention of living in the west. And yet she’s spent 30 years in California – longer than she lived in Morocco – after studying in the country and then getting married. Yet sometimes Lalami still feels like an outsider, although, she says, “it’s not a bad thing.”
It’s certainly been a benefit to her in her career, which includes a Pulitzer Prize for fiction nomination for her 2014 historical novel, The Moor’s Account. “That chance turn in my life, moving to the US, ended up affecting my artistic journey,” she says. “Immigration splinters the self, but it helped me look anew at my art. It has been the source of a lot of inspiration and reflection and has made its way into everything that I write, this sense of displacement, of dislocation, of feeling like you don’t belong. For a long time, I thought it was a burden. It took me a while to understand that that was what made me a writer.”
Belonging to Morocco is also reflected in her work. “I’ve always written about Moroccan characters,” she says. “My aim is to create a body of work in which Moroccan characters are portrayed as they’re going about their lives.” Her new novel, The Dream Hotel, explores this idea through its protagonist, Sara, who is arrested and detained in a facility for a crime she has only dreamed of committing. It’s a chilling book, and one that often hits a little too close to home for a society dependent on technology.
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