Canadian · b. 1982
Omar El Akkad is an Egyptian-born Canadian journalist and novelist. He was born in Cairo, grew up in Doha, Qatar, and moved to Canada as a teenager. He worked for The Globe and Mail, where he covered the war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring, and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. His debut novel, American War (2017), imagines a second American civil war and its refugees, and was widely translated. His second novel, What Strange Paradise (2021), follows a young Syrian refugee who survives a shipwreck, and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His first nonfiction book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025), is a personal account of the Western response to Gaza. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His work links reporting on war and migration with fiction and essay, and he now lives in the United States.