Loading ...Laila Lalami’s Novel Nominated for Second International Honor
UC Riverside creative writing professor Laila Lalami has been nominated for another international award for her novel “The Moor’s Account.” The book was shortlisted for Italy’s The Bridge Book Award, which recognizes top works of fiction and nonfiction by writers in the United States and Italy.
“The Moor’s Account” (Pantheon 2014) was one of five novels written by authors in the U.S. nominated for the award.
Lalami, who joined the Department of Creative Writing faculty in 2007, also was recently named one of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world by The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in Amman, Jordan. She is one of 42 writers, actors and musicians named in the category of Arts & Culture. The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre is an independent research entity affiliated with the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, an international Islamic non-governmental, independent institute headquartered in Amman.
“The Moor’s Account” is the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America — a Moroccan slave whose testimony was left out of the official record of the 1527 expedition of Spanish conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez. There were only four survivors.
The work of historical fiction has won numerous honors this year. It was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, won an American Book Award from The Before Columbus Foundation, was a co-winner of the Arab American Book Award for Fiction, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and is a finalist for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award. It also was named a New York Times Notable Book and one of the Wall Street Journal’s Top 10 Books of the Year, one of NPR’s Great Reads of 2014, and was on the list of Kirkus Best Fiction Books of the Year.
Source: ucrtoday.ucr.edu