Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami (1968) was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She lives in the United States, where she is a professor at the University of California. She is the author of four novels, including The Moor’s Account, Her other books include The Other Americans and Conditional Citizens.

About the Book The Moor's Account has won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Salman Rushdie: “Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadors and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth.”

In 1527, the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez sailed from the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda with a crew of six hundred men and nearly a hundred horses. His goal was to claim what is now the Gulf Coast of the United States for the Spanish crown and, in the process, become as wealthy and famous as Hernán Cortés.

But from the moment the Narváez expedition landed in Florida, it faced peril, navigational errors, disease, starvation, as well as resistance from indigenous tribes. Within a year there were only four survivors: the expedition’s treasurer, Cabeza de Vaca; a Spanish nobleman named Alonso del Castillo; a young explorer named Andrés Dorantes; and Dorantes’s Moroccan slave, Mustafa al-Zamori, whom the other three Spaniards called Estebanico. These four survivors would go on to make a journey across America that would transform them from proud conquistadores to humble servants, from fearful outcasts to faith healers.

The Moor’s Account brilliantly captures Estebanico’s voice and vision, giving us an alternate narrative for this famed expedition. As this dramatic chronicle unfolds, we come to understand that, contrary to popular belief, black men played a significant part in New World exploration, and that Native American men and women were not merely silent witnesses to it. In Laila Lalami’s deft hands, Estebanico’s memoir illuminates the ways in which stories can transmigrate into history, even as storytelling can offer a chance at redemption and survival.

In cooperation with Uitgeverij Nieuw Amsterdam.