Omar El Akkad

My guest on this episode is Omar El Akkad. Omar is an author and celebrated journalist whose debut novel, American War, was published in 2017. It was an international bestseller, was translated into thirteen languages, and won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize as well as being nominated for nearly a dozen other awards. It was also a finalist on Canada Reads. His second and most recent novel, What Strange Paradise, was published in 2021 by McClelland & Stewart in Canada. It won the Giller Prize, The Pacific Northwest Book Award, and landed on the shortlist for many other awards. It, too, was a finalist on Canada Reads. In its review, which Omar mentions in our conversation, the New York Times Book Review said that What Strange Paradise “deserves to be an instant classic.”

Omar and I talk about the three unpublished novels he wrote before American War, about the fact that, though he is very grateful for the success he has had so far, he still feels some nostalgic for the years he spent writing those unpublished novels, and about a recent creative writing retreat, his first, that was a disaster of nearly novelistic proportions.

 

Omar El Akkad: omarelakkad.com

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Contact Nathan Whitlock at nathanwhitlock.ca/contact