A total ban on fossil fuels as part of an environmental Hail Mary re-opens America’s oldest wounds. If, at a glance, that premise sounds farfetched, El Akkad draws the path towards a second civil war with such meticulous care it quickly begins to seem more possible than any of us would like to imagine. Let's just remind ourselves that in Charlottesville, a cultural and political civil war is being fought over the removal of statues commemorating the actual American Civil War.Īnd so, as imagined by El Akkad: by 2074, America has once again been torn into North and South and open war rages across the once-united nation. Literary heavyweights like The Handmaid’s Taleand Nineteen Eighty-Four have rapidly gone from distant allegories to darkened reflections of reality and while their worst case scenarios might still remain at least a few dark moves away, Omar El Akkad’s debut novel American War outlines more clearly than ever before how we might get swept from here to there in the blink of an eye. As power structures wobble, whole demographics swing recklessly right and world leaders hurl out hand grenades of mindless bigotry in the form of grammar-resistant Twitter dumps, the works of Atwood and Orwell have become the most obvious guiding light for many trying to understand how we got here. His new novel, What Strange Paradise, was released in July, 2021 and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize.With each week bringing some fresh political cataclysm, many commenters have remarked that the current verve for dystopian fiction comes as no surprise. 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. 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. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. 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 work earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. 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. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist.

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