His short story “Government Slots” was selected for the Best Canadian Stories 2020 anthology. 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. Omar El Akkad's debut novel, American War, is an unlikely mash-up of unsparing war reporting and plot elements familiar to readers of the recent young-adult dystopian series The. 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 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. American War is an interesting blend of ideas. To which Simon replies, "It wasn't junk.Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. Omar El Akkad thinks so, and based on this scenario he has produced American War - a fictional history of the second American Civil War to come. I didn't take any clothes, didn't take any of the money Mama had saved up all her life. Years later, when Sarat returns from Sugarloaf a broken woman, she mentions this to Simon: "So I went back, and you know what I took? I took Dad's old statue, the Virgin of Guadalupe I took that turtle Marcus and I kept as a pet I took a couple of old photos from Mama's bunk.
The statue is one of the few non-essential items Martina takes with her to Camp Patience and it is among the only objects Sarat hunts down in the aftermath of the camp massacre. It was the Virgin of Guadalupe, cast in ceramic, her hands pressed against each other, her head lowered in prayer" (11). It is first described in Chapter 1: "By the front door, a statue from the days of Benjamin's childhood kept vigil. The mission of Omar El Akkad ’s first novel, American War, is admirable: to encourage western readers, especially Americans, to put themselves in the shoes of the world’s radicalised. Perhaps the only exception to this is her father's statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a Catholic title for the Blessed Virgin Mary. Throughout the novel, Sarat cares less and less about material objects or nostalgic mementos.
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