{"id":405314,"date":"2022-02-10T16:03:54","date_gmt":"2022-02-10T13:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/giller-prize-winning-author-omar-el-akkads-powerful-writing-is-making-a-mark\/"},"modified":"2022-02-10T16:03:54","modified_gmt":"2022-02-10T13:03:54","slug":"giller-prize-winning-author-omar-el-akkads-powerful-writing-is-making-a-mark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/giller-prize-winning-author-omar-el-akkads-powerful-writing-is-making-a-mark\/","title":{"rendered":"#Giller Prize-winning author Omar El Akkad’s powerful writing is making a mark"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Giller Prize-winning author Omar El Akkad’s powerful writing is making a mark<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n The Egyptian-Canadian author is turning journalistic savvy into literary clout. He’s on this year’s Maclean’s Power List.\n <\/div>\n
\n Omar El Akkad is No. 43 on the 2022 <\/em>Maclean\u2019s Power List, a ranking of 50 influential Canadians. Click here to see the full list.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

A friend of El Akkad was recently scrolling through Facebook<\/a> posts from her book club when she came across a reference to one of his novels. One member of the group had dismissed El Akkad\u2019s book in the comments as \u201coverrated\u201d\u2014a message the friend conveyed to the author, dismayed that anyone would speak thus about his writing. El Akkad was equally mystified, but not for the same reason: \u201cI thought, \u2018I can\u2019t believe they think it\u2019s rated,\u2019 \u201d he tells Maclean\u2019s<\/em>. \u201cYou have to be rated to be overrated.\u201d<\/p>\n

This time last year, El Akkad wasn\u2019t sure anyone would even read his latest novel, What Strange Paradise<\/em>. It is the story of a young Syrian asylum seeker who survives a shipwreck\u2014or, as El Akkad explains it, a reinterpretation of the famous Western fable Peter Pan<\/em>, if the boy who wouldn\u2019t grow up were a child refugee. The novel went on to win the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize, one of the country\u2019s most prestigious literary awards.<\/p>\n

A former reporter with the Globe and Mail<\/em>, the Egyptian-Canadian says that, on good days as a journalist, he felt like he was changing the world by telling the truth. On bad days, he felt like he was rewriting press releases. \u201cI\u2019m sure quarterly App<\/a>le earnings are of huge interest to certain segments of the population,\u201d he says from his home in Oregon. \u201cUnfortunately, I\u2019m not part of any of those segments.\u201d<\/p>\n

THE POWER LIST: See the full ranking of 50 Canadians<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One such day at work prompted him to take the fourth book he\u2019d written in his spare time\u2014no one other than a close friend has read any of the first three\u2014and email it to a literary agent he\u2019d met years earlier. The manuscript had been sitting on his computer hard drive for months. But the result was his highly regarded 2017 debut novel American War<\/em>, a dystopian tale about a second U.S. Civil War, this time over fossil fuels in a world beset by climate change.<\/p>\n

The book didn\u2019t produce the miraculous outcome a younger version of El Akkad might have imagined; that is, \u201ccausing the West to stop bombing brown people.\u201d But the BBC listed it as one of the \u201c100 novels that shaped our world\u201d from the past 300 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cI still get emails about American War<\/em>,\u201d El Akkad says. \u201cFiction is deceptive in that regard. It works its way into the psyche, and remains there in ways that my journalism reporting never really did.\u201d<\/p>\n

He believes he\u2019s a different person than when he worked in journalism. That happens, he says, when you come out the other side of writing a novel. Similarly, he hopes that if fiction has any power on the reader, it would \u201cserve as a eulogy for the person you were before you read the book.\u201d
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