Omar El Akkad (born 1982) is an Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist, whose novel What Strange Paradise was the winner of the 2021 Giller Prize.
[1] Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt, and grew up in Doha, Qatar.
[3] For ten years he was a staff reporter for The Globe and Mail, where he covered the war in Afghanistan, military trials at Guantanamo Bay and the Arab Spring in Egypt.
She wrote that "melodramatic" dialogue could be forgiven by the use of details that makes the fictional future "seem alarmingly real".
[16] In 2022, Omar El Akkad appeared on the podcast, The Literary City with Ramjee Chandran to talk about "What Strange Paradise."