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Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami, is fascinated by the extractive power of technology: ‘Techno-capitalism has infiltrated our lives to such an extent that our only real break from it comes when we sleep.
Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami, is fascinated by the extractive power of technology: ‘Techno-capitalism has infiltrated our lives to such an extent that our only real break from it comes when we sleep. I began to wonder what might happen if that kind of extractive power were applied to the world of dreams.’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
As a young child, my first exposure to books was through French comics. I would spend hours on the sofa every day, completely enraptured by The Adventures of Tintin, Spirou and Fantasio and Asterix et Obelix. Then at some point in middle school, I moved on to adventure novels like The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. I was used to seeing European characters in the books I read, a situation so normalized that I didn’t realize it was imbalanced until I was about twelve or thirteen, when I began to read adult fiction, especially works by Moroccan authors like Driss Chraibi, Leila Abouzeid, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Mohamed Choukri, who wrote about the world as I knew it. That opened up new horizons.
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About the Author
is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her new novel, The Dream Hotel, was published in March 2025.
Nigerian novelist, poet and author of Graceland, Chris Abani, does not believe ‘Nigerian literature’ exists as a category: ‘It is a common misconception that there is a fixed category that can be read as essentially “Nigerian literature”. Nigeria has 500 nations, 500 languages and about 2,000 dialects. While culture and language can overlap, the level of diversity is such that Nigerian literature cannot be easily narrowed down.’
For the co-founder and publishing director, of Cassava Republic Press, which marks its 20th anniversary this year, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, it is telling that African literature is often pronounced dead in recent years, when more women and queer voices are becoming more prominent: ‘The loudest obituary writers about African literature tend to be men. These elegies seem to come from a tacit sense of personal or generational displacement rather than from the actual state of the field.’
Nigerian poet, novelist and author of Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-Hearted, Ben Okri, argues that Nigerian literature doesn’t always have to be about Nigeria: ‘Nigerian literature limits itself to Nigeria and then limits even the ways in which the country can be written about. What we want is a vast literature, a great literature…that speaks to all humanity.’
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