Her literary criticism, cultural commentary, and opinion pieces have appeared in The Boston Globe, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere.
Lalami began writing fiction and nonfiction in English in 1996. Writing professionally in English, she said, gave her another perspective. She became aware of the code-switching followed by her and her family, and some upper-class native Moroccans, in their transitions between the two languages. She was influenced by the work of Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said. Her experiences and studies caused her to reflect on the uses of French and Arabic in Morocco.
She had chosen the field of linguistics in order to be involved with the study of language, even in analysis. In 1992 she moved to Los Angeles, California, to attend the University of Southern California, from which she graduated with a PhD in Linguistics. After graduating, she returned to Morocco and worked briefly as a journalist and commentator. In 1990, she received a British Council fellowship to study in England, where she completed an MA in Linguistics at University College London. Lalami earned her Licence ès Lettres in English from Mohammed V University in Rabat.
While her parents both read widely in a variety of genres and encouraged her writing, Lalami has said that they thought she needed to study a profession other than writing. These images invaded my imaginary world to such an extent that I never thought they came from an alien place." "The characters’ names, their homes, their cities, their lives were wholly different from my own," she explained, "and yet, because of my constant exposure to them, they had grown utterly familiar. According to Lalami, all the children's books she read as a child were written in French, and she began to write her own stories in French. She spoke Moroccan Arabic at home, and learned Standard Arabic and French in elementary school. Lalami was born in a working-class family in Rabat, Morocco. In 2015 she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her novel The Moor's Account (2014), about Estevanico, which received strong critical praise and won several other awards. Her first novel, composed of linked stories, was published in 2005. She began publishing her writing in 1996. In 1992 Lalami moved to the United States, where she completed a PhD in linguistics at the University of Southern California. After earning her Licence de lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics. Laila Lalami ( Arabic: ليلى العلمي, born 1968) is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor.
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