Omar El Akkad
Thursday 09/10 @7pm
Muskie Archives 201

National Book Award-winning author and reporter Omar El Akkad was born in Egypt, and was raised in Qatar before moving to Canada with his family. His reporting includes dispatches from the war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantànamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. El Akkad is a recipient of Canada’s National Newspaper Award for investigative reporting and the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists. His debut novel, American War (Vintage 2017), won the Oregon Book Award for Fiction and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. His second novel, What Strange Paradise (Knopf 2021), won the Giller Prize for Canadian fiction. El Akkad’s first full-length work of creative nonfiction, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, won the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

For more information, contact Prof. Myronn Hardy at mhardy@bates.edu.