Omar El Akkad

Omar El Akkad (; born 1982) is an Egyptian-Canadian-American novelist and journalist. A former staff reporter for The Globe and Mail, he is the author of the novels American War and What Strange Paradise (2021), and of the nonfiction book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025). What Strange Paradise won the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This won the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Early life and education El Akkad was born in Cairo and grew up in, Doha, Qatar. as a teenager with his family.

Career El Akkad worked for about a decade as a staff reporter for The Globe and Mail, His journalism received a National Newspaper Award for investigative reporting and the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for young Canadian journalists.

His debut novel, American War, was published in 2017. The novel won the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and it was shortlisted for the 2017 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. In 2019, the BBC included American War on its list of 100 novels that shaped the world.

His second novel, What Strange Paradise, was published in 2021. It won the 2021 Giller Prize, the 2022 Oregon Book Award for fiction, and a 2022 Pacific Northwest Book Award.

In 2025, El Akkad published his first nonfiction book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The book won the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction. He lives in Portland, Oregon.