Omar El Akkad

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Omar El Akkad (* 1982 in Cairo ) is a Canadian writer , journalist and war correspondent of Egyptian origin.

life and work

El Akkad emigrated to Qatar with his parents at the age of five, and moved to Canada with his family at the age of 16. He studied computer science at Queens University in Kingston.

El Akkad then worked for ten years as a reporter for the Canadian daily newspaper The Globe and Mail . During this time he reported on the Afghanistan war , the Guantanamo Bay prison camp , the Arab Spring in Egypt, the Black Lives Matter movement and the effects of climate change in the United States .

His first novel, American War , was published in 2017. This was received positively by the criticism. The novel was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize 2017. The taz , Frankfurter Rundschau and the Süddeutsche Zeitung , on the other hand, unanimously and very clearly reject the book.

He lives in Portland, Oregon .

Works

  • American War , 2017 - Novel about a fictional second American Civil War in the late 21st century .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Alice Cary: Omar El Akkad - From the front lines to fiction (en) . In: BookPage.com . 
  2. ↑ Karen Krüger: America's Descent and Fall . In: FAZ.net , July 26, 2017. 
  3. ↑ Omar El Akkad | Penguin Random House ( en )
  4. ↑ Michiko Kakutani: A Haunting Debut Looks Ahead to a Second American Civil War (en) . In: The New York Times , March 27, 2017. 
  5. ↑ Peter Henning: Everything on red! . In: Spiegel Online , August 2, 2017. 
  6. ↑ Erin Balser: David Chariandy wins the $ 50K Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize ( en ) January 3, 2018.
  7. ↑ The 3 reviews can be found at Perlentaucher .
  8. ^ Antje Deistler: Terror with an American face . In: Deutschlandfunk , August 6, 2017. 
personal data
SURNAME El Akkad, Omar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian journalist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1982
PLACE OF BIRTH Cairo