Omar El Akkad

Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. The start of his journalism career coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and many other locations around the world. His work earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists.

His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and many other newspapers and magazines. 

His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Washington Post, GQ, NPR, Esquire and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 novels that changed our world.

His short story “Government Slots” was selected for the Best Canadian Stories 2020 anthology. His newest novel, What Strange Paradise, won the 2021 Giller Prize and the Pacific Northwest Book Award.

Excerpt from What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad

The child lies on the shore. All around him the beach is littered with the wreckage of the boat and the wreckage of its passengers: shards of decking, knapsacks cleaved and gutted, bodies frozen in unnatural contortion. Dispossessed of nightfall’s temporary burial, the dead ferment indecency. There’s too much of spring in the day, too much light.

Facedown, with his arms outstretched, the child appears from a distance as though playing at flight. And so too in the bodies that surround him, though distended with seawater and hardening, there flicker the remnants of some silent levitation, a severance from the laws of being.

The sea is tranquil now; the storm has passed. The island, despite the debris, is calm. A pair of plump orange-necked birds, stragglers from a northbound flock, take rest on the lamppost from which hangs one end of a police cordon. In the breaks between the wailing of the sirens and the murmur of the onlookers, they can be heard singing. The species is not unique to the island nor the island to the species, but the birds, when they stop here, change the pitch of their songs. The call is an octave higher, a sharp, throat-scraping thing.

In time a crowd gathers near the site of the shipwreck, tourists and locals alike. People watch.

The eldest of them, an arthritic fisherman driven in recent years by plummeting cherubfish stocks to kitchen work at a nearby resort, says that it’s never been like this before on the island. Other locals nod, because even though the history of this place is that of violent endings, of galleys flipped over the axis of their oars and fishing skiffs tangled in their own netting and once, during the war, an empty Higgins lander sheared to ribbons by shrapnel, the old man is still, in his own way, right. These are foreign dead.

Continue reading an excerpt from What Strange Paradise in CBC Books.

Links

• “Omar El Akkad and Tareq Hadhad discuss the novel What Strange Paradise.” CBC, YouTube. 4 March 2022.
• “Omar El Akkad on ‘The Privilege of Instantaneous Forgetting.'” Interview Magazine. 23 July 2021.
• “Book Review: ‘What Strange Paradise,’ by Omar El Akkad.” The New York Times. 20 July 2021.