Omar El Akkad

Omar El Akkad is an Egyptian-Canadian journalist and novelist, born in Cairo in 1982, raised in Doha, Qatar, and settled in Canada as a teenager. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail he covered the war in Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay and the Arab Spring. His first novel, American War (2017), imagines a second American civil war; his second, What Strange Paradise (2021), follows a child refugee washed ashore and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His essay One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025) won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.