Omar El Akkad is an Egyptian-American-Canadian novelist and journalist. He worked as a staff reporter for The Globe and Mail before establishing himself as a fiction writer. El Akkad's debut novel American War was published in 2017. His second novel, What Strange Paradise, was released in 2021 and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize that same year. In 2025, he published the nonfiction work One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.