Omar Mouallem | |
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| Born | September 13, 1985 Slave Lake, Alberta, Canada |
| Occupation | Writer, Filmmaker, Educator |
Omar Mouallem is a Canadian writer [1] and filmmaker. He has contributed to Wired , The Guardian , The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone . His essays and features have garnered him recognition from the Canadian National Magazine Awards and Alberta Literary Awards. [2] He co-authored a book about the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire titled Inside the Inferno: A Firefighter's Story of the Brotherhood that Saved Fort McMurray (published by Simon & Schuster Canada). [3] His book Praying to the West: How Muslims Shaped the Americas, a travelogue centred around 13 mosques, was named one of the best books of 2021 by The Globe and Mail. [4] It was awarded the 2022 Wilfred Eggleston Nonfiction Award by the Alberta Literary Awards. [5]
He has won three Canadian National Magazine Awards, [6] including best profile in 2014 for the Eighteen Bridges story, "The Kingdom of Haymour", which profiled a man who took the Canadian Embassy in Beirut hostage in the 1970s over a British Columbia land dispute. [1] The article partially inspired the 2020 documentary film Eddy’s Kingdom, for which Mouallem was a key interviewee. [7]
Mouallem directed and produced two documentaries, 2019’s Digging in the Dirt, a CBC coproduction about a mental health crises in the Alberta oil sands workforce, and 2021’s The Last Baron, a first-person film about the unlikely connection between Lebanon’s civil war and the Canadian fast-food chain Burger Baron. [8] After premiering on CBC Gem, it gained notable popularity and it was heralded as one of the “best Canadian food documentaries” by enRoute magazine. [9] Mouallem announced that the short film would be expanded into a feature documentary retitled The Lebanese Burger Mafia and released in 2023. [10] Mouallem has contributed to YouthWrite, hosting a workshop during JustWrite in 2017 called Profiling Without Fear, covering how to capture the essence of a subject. [11]
In 2013, he won Edmonton's Emerging Artist Award and served as the Edmonton Public Library's writer in residence. [12] In 2022, he was awarded an Emerging Artists Award from the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta. [13]
Mouallem also works as a writing mentor in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program at the University of King's College, Halifax. [14]
