Fez — Laila Lalami is one of the most acclaimed Moroccan writers in contemporary American literature, known for novels that interrogate history, migration, race, and state authority.
Over the past two decades, her work has received some of the most prestigious literary awards in the United States.
Her latest novel, “The Dream Hotel,” extends her concerns into the realm of surveillance and predictive technology.
From Rabat to the American literary canon
Born in Rabat in 1968, Lalami was raised in Morocco before moving to the United States in her early twenties. She studied linguistics and later earned a doctorate from the University of Southern California. Writing in English, she developed a literary voice shaped by Moroccan history, Arabic narrative traditions, and American realism.
Her work consistently examines how individuals navigate institutions that define who belongs, who is trusted, and who is erased.
A bibliography shaped by displacement and power
Lalami’s debut novel, “Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits,” follows a group of Moroccans attempting to cross the Strait of Gibraltar. The book was selected as a Los Angeles Times Notable Book and established her reputation as a writer attentive to the moral weight of migration.
Her international breakthrough came with “The Moor’s Account,” which reimagines a failed sixteenth-century Spanish expedition from the perspective of an enslaved Moroccan man written out of official history. The novel won the American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, marking Lalami as a major historical novelist.
In “The Other Americans,” Lalami turned to contemporary California, tracing the aftermath of a Moroccan immigrant’s death through multiple narrators. The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, the Kirkus Prize, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and won the Simpson Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.
Her nonfiction work, “Conditional Citizens,” was widely praised for its analysis of citizenship, race, and unequal access to rights in the United States, further cementing her role as a leading public intellectual.
A restrained and exacting literary style
Lalami’s prose is marked by precision and control. She avoids ornamental language in favor of clarity, allowing ethical and political tensions to surface gradually. Her frequent use of multiple narrators challenges singular truths and exposes how institutions shape perception and memory.
Across her work, authority is never abstract. It appears through borders, police reports, archives, data systems, and bureaucratic decisions that quietly determine human outcomes.
‘The Dream Hotel’ and the politics of surveillance
Published in 2025, The Dream Hotel marks a decisive turn in Laila Lalami’s career toward speculative fiction grounded in contemporary anxieties.
The novel follows Sara Hussein, a museum archivist stopped at an airport while returning to Los Angeles and informed that she is likely to commit a violent crime in the near future.
The accusation does not stem from her actions, but from data extracted from her dreams. Agents from the fictional Risk Assessment Administration tell Sara that algorithmic analysis of her subconscious indicates a risk that she may harm her husband. She is placed under mandatory observation for 21 days, despite having committed no crime.
Sara is transferred to a facility known as the Dream Hotel, officially described as a retention center rather than a prison. Inside, residents are carefully monitored through neuroprosthetic devices that track their mental activity, sleep patterns, and emotional fluctuations. The language of incarceration is deliberately softened. Detainees are referred to as residents, enrollees, or participants, a bureaucratic euphemism that masks the reality of confinement.
Lalami portrays the Dream Hotel as a place where comfort becomes a tool of control. Clean lines, regulated routines, and constant surveillance encourage obedience rather than resistance. The novel focuses less on rebellion than on the psychological toll of enforced compliance, showing how power operates through exhaustion, fear, and internalized discipline.
As Sara navigates life among other women held for predicted future offenses, the arrival of a new resident destabilizes the fragile order of the facility. Her presence exposes cracks in the system and forces Sara to confront the institutions that claim to protect society while quietly eroding personal autonomy.
Through Sara’s experience, Lalami explores the seductive logic of predictive technology and the dangers of treating data as destiny. Dreams, traditionally understood as private and symbolic, become prosecutable material. Silence becomes self-defense. Even emotional expression carries risk.
Rather than constructing a distant dystopia, “The Dream Hotel” feels uncomfortably close to the present. Its systems resemble existing debates around algorithmic policing, biometric surveillance, and the expansion of carceral logic into everyday life. Lalami’s restraint amplifies the novel’s impact. The terror lies not in spectacle, but in plausibility.
With “The Dream Hotel,” Lalami extends her long-standing interrogation of power into the digital age, asking how freedom can survive when even the subconscious is subject to governance. The novel confirms her reputation as a writer who does not merely reflect the world as it is, but anticipates the moral questions it is rushing toward.
A career defined by recognition and relevance
Through major awards, repeated prize nominations, and sustained critical attention, Laila Lalami has secured a central place in modern literature.
With “The Dream Hotel,” she continues to expand the scope of her work while remaining anchored in the same core question that defines her career. Who is allowed freedom, and under what conditions.
Her writing does not offer easy answers, but it consistently demands that readers confront the systems that govern their lives, both visible and hidden.
