The Dream Hotel: Laila Lalami in conversation with Jennifer Mills

The Dream Hotel is a work of literary scifi, following Sara Hussein as she detained when re-entering the US by a government agency tasked with determining people's potential to commit crimes, using technology that can surveil even their dreams.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.

Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor's Account, which won the American Book Award, Arab American Book Award and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her essays appear regularly in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, Guardian and New York Times. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.

Jennifer Mills is the author of the novels Salvage (2025), The Airways (2021) Dyschronia (2018), Gone (2011) and The Diamond Anchor (2009) and a collection of short stories, The Rest is Weight (2012). In 2019 Dyschronia was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and the Aurealis Awards for science fiction. Mills' fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been widely published, as well as being broadcast, recorded and performed from Adelaide to Berlin. She is a regular writer for Overland literary journal and has contributed criticism to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Wheeler Centre, and the Sydney Review of Books. From 2012-2018 she was the fiction editor at Overland.

This event is part of Constellations 2026, the community-led response to the attempts to silence Palestinian voices at Adelaide Writers' Week. We stand in solidarity with Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah.

This event is free and is made possible through volunteer efforts. All authors are being paid ASA rates, made possible through donations and sponsorship. We would appreciate any donation you are able to make.

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