Career
For ten years he 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. [2] He was most recently a correspondent for the western United States, where he covered Black Lives Matter. [4]
His first novel, American War, was published in 2017. [5] [6] 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". [7] The Globe and Mail called it "a masterful debut." [8] The novel was named a shortlisted finalist for the 2017 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, [9] and for the 2018 amazon.ca First Novel Award, and won a Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. [10] [11]
In November 2019 BBC News listed American War on a list of the 100 most influential novels. [12]
In 2021, El Akkad appeared on the podcast Storybound . [13]
On November 8, 2021, El Akkad won the Giller Prize for What Strange Paradise . [14] The novel was selected for the 2022 edition of Canada Reads . It was defended by Tareq Hadhad. [15] The book follows migration and what is at the core of the global crisis. It follows Amir, a Syrian boy who is the only survivor of a migrant boat sinking. [16]
He has also written the foreword to Yasmine Seale's The Annotated Arabian Nights: Tales from 1001 Nights [17] , the most recent English translation of the classic Middle Eastern story collection (and the only complete English translation from the original text done by a woman). [18]
In 2022, Omar El Akkad appeared on the podcast, The Literary City with Ramjee Chandran to talk about "What Strange Paradise."
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