Omar El Akkad


Omar El Akkad is an Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist.

Early life and education

Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt, and grew up in Doha, Qatar. When he was 16 years old, he moved to Canada, completing high school in Montreal and university at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. He has a computer science degree.

Career

For ten years he was a staff reporter for The Globe and Mail, where he covered the War in Afghanistan, military trials at Guantanamo Bay and the Arab Spring in Egypt. He was most recently a correspondent for the western United States, where he covered Black Lives Matter.
His first novel, American War, was published in 2017. It received positive reviews from critics; The New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani compared it favourably to Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Philip Roth's novel The Plot Against America. She wrote that "melodramatic" dialogue could be forgiven by the use of details that makes the fictional future "seem alarmingly real". The Globe and Mail called it "a masterful debut." The novel was named a shortlisted finalist for the 2017 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and for the 2018 amazon.ca First Novel Award, and won a Kobo Emerging Writer Prize.
In November 2019 the BBC News listed American War on a list of the 100 most influential novels.

Personal life

He lives with his wife and daughter in Portland, Oregon.