Akhtar is known as a playwright covering various themes including the American-Muslim experience, racism, religion, economics, immigration, and identity.

[1] Akhtar attended Brown University, where he majored in theater and religion and began acting and directing student plays.

[8][9] The play won the Obie Award and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and premiered at the Bush Theatre in London that spring.

[12][13] Akhtar's second play, The Who & The What, premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in February 2014,[14] followed by a run at Lincoln Center Theater in June.

[16] Akhtar's third play The Invisible Hand premiered at the New York Theatre Workshop in December 2014,[17] a production which invited comparison to the work of Shaw, Brecht, and Arthur Miller.

In May 2016, the play premiered in London at The Tricycle Theatre and received nominations for the Evening Standard and Laurence Olivier awards.

According to the publisher's press release, the book is drawn from Akhtar's life as the son of Muslim immigrants; he blends fact and fiction to tell a story of belonging and dispossession about the world that 9/11 made.

[38] Homeland Elegies was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction,[39] and won the 2021 American Book Award.

[40] An eight-episode limited series of Homeland Elegies is in development at FX, starring Kumail Nanjiani and adapted by Akhtar and Oren Moverman, who will direct all the episodes.

[44] In 2024 his latest play McNeal, surrounding the ethics of artificial intelligence, was produced on Broadway starring Robert Downey Jr. at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in Lincoln Center.

In 2015, The Economist wrote that Akhtar's tales of assimilation "are as essential today as the work of Saul Bellow, James Farrell, and Vladimir Nabokov were in the 20th century in capturing the drama of the immigrant experience.

"[49] As a playwright Homeland Elegies American Dervish General Books Plays Ashraf Ibrahim Zidan translated Akhtar's Disgraced into Arabic under the title Al-Makhzi.