Omar El Akkad
Omar El Akkad is an Egyptian-Canadian-American author and journalist currently living in the USA. His book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This won the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction and whose novel What Strange Paradise was the winner of the 2021 Giller Prize.
Early life and education
Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt, and grew up in Doha, Qatar. He attended an American international school in Egypt. When he was 16 years old, he moved to Canada with his family, completing high school in Montreal and university at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. He has a computer science degree.Career
For ten years, El Akkad was a staff reporter for The Globe and Mail, where he covered the war in Afghanistan, military trials at Guantanamo Bay and the Arab Spring in Egypt. He was most recently a correspondent for the western United States, where he covered Black Lives Matter.His first novel, American War, was published in 2017. It received positive reviews from critics; The New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani compared it favourably to Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Philip Roth's novel The Plot Against America. She wrote that "melodramatic" dialogue could be forgiven by the use of details that makes the fictional future "seem alarmingly real". The Globe and Mail called it "a masterful debut". In November 2019, BBC News listed American War on a list of the 100 most influential novels.
His second novel, What Strange Paradise, tells the tale of the migration crisis through the eyes of a young child by following a young Syrian boy named Amir who is the only survivor of the sinking of a migrant boat. It was championed by Tareq Hadhad.
He has written the foreword to Yasmine Seale's The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1001 Nights, the most recent English translation of the classic Middle Eastern story collection.
In 2025, El Akkad published One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This about the war on Gaza.
Awards
American War was named a shortlisted finalist for the 2017 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and for the 2018 amazon.ca First Novel Award, and won a Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.El Akkad won the Giller Prize for What Strange Paradise in November 2021. The novel was selected for the 2022 edition of Canada Reads. It was defended by Tareq Hadhad.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This won the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
He has had works selected as book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Globe and Mail.
Personal life
He lives with his wife and children in Portland, Oregon, United States.He is a Muslim.