Laila Lalami (Arabic: ليلى العلمي, born 1968) is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor.

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.

"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.

In 1990, she received a British Council fellowship to study in England, where she completed an MA in Linguistics at University College London.

A young college student named Youssef El Mekki discovers that his father—whom he'd been led to believe was a high school teacher, and dead for many years—is a businessman who lives across town.

But Youssef's burgeoning relationship with his father, and his sudden change in fortune, are threatened by social and political unrest in the city.

The novel is told from the perspective of Estevanico, a Moroccan slave who is documented as part of the ill-fated Narváez expedition of 1527 and was one of four survivors to reach Mexico City in 1536.

The book begins with the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant in a hit-and-run accident in a small town in California, and is told from the perspectives of nine different characters who are connected to him.

[17] Lalami's next book, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America, is a collection of essays on the theme of American identity and citizenship.