Egyptian-born Canadian journalist and novelist whose work has moved steadily from reported war journalism into fiction and essayistic political writing that refuses the distinctions normally kept between them. El Akkad grew up in Doha, emigrated with his family to Canada at sixteen, and spent a decade at the Globe and Mail covering the war in Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, and the Guantánamo trials — experiences that gave his subsequent fiction its unmistakable documentary weight.
His debut novel American War (2017) imagined a mid-21st-century Second American Civil War triggered by the outlawing of fossil fuels, with a Southern girl radicalized in a border refugee camp into the war's most consequential fighter. The inversion was deliberate: El Akkad took the techniques and moral textures of American reporting on Middle Eastern insurgencies and applied them to Americans, asking readers who had understood one from the outside to see themselves from the same distance. What Strange Paradise (2021) took up the Mediterranean refugee crisis with sharp, short chapters alternating between a drowning boat and a small island receiving its survivors; it won the Giller Prize.
His most recent book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025), is a long essay written during the war in Gaza, arguing with concentrated moral force that the language Western liberal institutions use to register their concern while continuing to arm and excuse the violence is itself one of the forms the violence takes. The title captures something El Akkad has been circling for years — the predictable retrospective moral clarity that refuses to arrive on time.