Omar El Akkad Biography

Omar El Akkad is an Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist. Raised in Doha, Qatar, he moved to Canada at the age of 16 and earned a degree in computer science from Queen's University in Ontario. He worked as a journalist for The Globe and Mail, covering the Afghanistan War, Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring, and the Black Lives Matter movement, earning a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award. 

His debut novel, “American War” (2017), a dystopian story of a second U.S. civil war, became a global bestseller, translated into 13 languages, and named a best book by The New York Times. His second novel, “What Strange Paradise” (2021), about the refugee crisis, won the Giller Prize. In 2025, he published “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”, a nonfiction critique of Western responses to the Gaza conflict.

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