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Omar El Akkad: “I write about things that make me angry”
At the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, the author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, which won the US National Book Award 2025, spoke about hope, engaging with systems of power, and how all literature is political
Congratulations on the success of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The title feels both prophetic and resigned. How did you arrive at it?
I never really used to post online — I feel short form is not my strong suit — but in late October 2023, I posted this tweet that I didn’t think was particularly profound. It was just this notion that, with respect to the slaughter in Gaza, that one day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.
I am not a very “smart” person, but I was thinking in terms of pattern recognition. I was thinking of a particular kind of mainstream liberal. I was thinking about how you won’t find anyone who will tell you they used to be in favour of segregation (in the US) or apartheid (in South Africa).
Originally, it was not going to be the title of this book. The title of this book was going to be The Glass Coffin. I was thinking about how offensive it is to show the body when you’re oppressed, when you’re on the receiving end of injustice. It was after the first draft was completed that one of my editors said, you should repurpose what you said in the tweet. That’s how the title came to be. Some people have a notion that I took a tweet and stretched it out to 250 pages, but I promise you that’s not what happened.
After two novels that grappled with war, displacement and grief, how did it feel to work on a completely different format?
It was strange because fiction is my first home. When I first started writing at six or seven years old — I was writing stories, I was writing fiction. And I loved — still do — the idea of creating stories. It’s my first language. But I’m also quite fluent in non-fiction because I spent 10 years as a journalist. And so, what was happening was that I was taking the stylistic approach I honed over the course of not just two published novels, but also three thoroughly unpublishable novels, that I have never shown to anybody. I was taking the style I had developed at a sentence level in those novels and trying to weld it to what I had learned as a journalist about presenting non-fiction. You can see parts where I’m trying to make those two things live together, and based on how you look, they are the strongest and weakest parts of the book.
But in terms of actual mechanics, because I had 10 years as a journalist, it wasn’t that difficult to get back into that mode.
How do you think about hope in writing — not as an antidote to despair, but perhaps as a kind of defiance?
I try to think of hope as a prologue and hope as an epilogue. I have no interest in hope as an epilogue. What I mean by that is that hope is a notion that no matter how badly we screw things up, everything’s going to work out in the end. Because every movie I watch, many books I read, that’s what happens. Everything works out in the end.
One of the traditional shapes in Western literature is the shape of a comedy. Not just the regular ha-ha comedy, but the Bible, the Divine Comedy. Things were good, then we lost faith, and then the plague came, and then we regained faith, and things got better. That natural attraction to the U-shape of comedy is where you have hope as an epilogue. But that is useless to me. It invites a kind of complacency.
Hope as prologue, hope as a starting point to actually do something to address the issues, is something I am more connected to. That’s the distinction I try to make. My starting point, purely as a function of survival, has to be hope.
Your fiction often engages with systems of power — who gets to tell the story, who gets to survive. Yet you resist turning your novels into polemics. How do you maintain that balance between urgency and subtlety?
I think a lot of my critics would tell you that my novels are entirely too polemic. I write about things that make me angry, and for the most part they tend to be systemic rather than individual. I am obsessed with systems of power, and the fraudulent narrative that you have to wrap around that system to make the awful things it does acceptable. Things like “collateral damage” and other kinds of linguistic malpractices are something I address in [One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This].
Jorge Luis Borges once said that all literature is tricks, and no matter how clever your tricks are, they eventually get discovered. Well, my central trick is inversion. I take something that’s headed this way, and I make it go the opposite way. For my book American War, I took things that have been happening in my part of the world, and I cast them in the centre of “the empire” to see how the people of the empire would react. My theory was that everybody reacts the same to being on the receiving end of injustice. It’s not a particularly clever trick, but it’s my central one.
As a journalist-turned-novelist, how do you navigate the tension between documenting and imagining? Does fiction feel like a truer way to tell the truth sometimes?
I think fiction for me allows access to the bulk of the human experience which I submit is fundamentally irrational. I think non-fiction is a very rational way to describe the irrational, and I think fiction is a very irrational way to describe the irrational. And so, it’s not that I hold one in higher esteem than the other. I think of them as antagonistic muscles.
So, when I’m thinking of what fiction brings to the table, it makes it easier for me to describe the plainly irrational things we do to ourselves and to one another. Love is irrational, memory is irrational, all of these things. That’s why I gravitate there. But there is a downside, which is that the subject matter that I cover a lot of the time is not abstract in the sense that it has happened to real people. So that makes me a tourist in someone else’s misery. And that comes with certain obligations and certain consequences. I’ve always had trouble with that because I do feel like there’s an element of appropriation and there’s an element of… something I haven’t been able to figure out yet.
You’ve said before that you’re less interested in writing about politics than in writing about the people politics happens to. How does that show up in these stories?
I often say that if my writing was political, which obviously I think it is, it’s not because I have taken a deliberate step to approach the political. It’s because the political has deliberately approached me. I’m an Arab Muslim guy named Omar living in the United States. Much of my existence is political and I have no choice in the matter. So, naturally, when I come to write, I can’t jettison that.
I also think that all literature is political. It’s either political by virtue of its active space, what you’re engaging with, or its negative space, what you’re choosing to ignore. I wish I had the privilege to write about how beautiful the sky is all the time and to write from a position that thinks of the political as a sullying thing — you know, this doesn’t belong in real literature. I wish I had that, but I don’t.
Do you think literature still has the capacity to challenge empathy fatigue — or are we past the point where storytelling can jolt us awake?
I think literature should never be held to the obligation of changing people’s minds. Because once you establish that as the baseline, not only does all of my writing fail, most of literature throughout human history fails. One of the reasons that 1984 keeps shooting up to the top of the bestseller list is precisely because people haven’t had their minds changed by it. If we had learned the lessons of books like that, they wouldn’t be at the top of the bestseller list anymore. So, I think that most literature probably fails in any kind of overt attempt to change people’s minds.
I’m not setting out to change someone’s mind. I am setting out to create a place where both the reader and I can think deeply about something. Knowing full well that I will probably emerge from that with no answers whatsoever. This is true, I think, of much of my non-fiction to a lesser extent. It’s certainly true of my fiction. I have no interest in changing your mind. I have created a space where I want to think deeply about something I’m deeply uncertain about. You’re welcome to join. If that changes your mind afterwards, great. If it doesn’t, that’s fine too.
You’ve lived across geographies — Egypt, Qatar, Canada — and your work often inhabits the in-between spaces of belonging. Has your sense of home changed as your writing has evolved?
I think so. I think when you’re young, whatever is happening is the norm. Which is why when you’re very young and you’re growing up rich, you don’t think of it as rich. And if you grow up poor, you don’t necessarily think of it as poor. Then you start to see other markers to judge yourself against, and suddenly the fullness of the situation comes about.
But if you had asked me what home was a few years ago, I would have told you it was Egypt. Because that was the country I was born in. I wouldn’t have said any other country — Qatar, because I was never awarded citizenship, Canada, or the US, even though I’m a citizen of both. I came to [Canada and the US] too late in life. I don’t have a root system there.
The more I write and the more I think about these things, the less home becomes a function of geography and the more it becomes a function of memory and relationship.
Do you see yourself as part of a lineage of writers who use fiction to interrogate systems — people like Arundhati Roy or Mohsin Hamid — or do you resist those comparisons?
I resist them but not for the reason you might think. These writers that you describe, I think, are far more talented and capable than I am and so it feels incredibly presumptuous to say that I am a part of the same cohort.
I can tell you the lineages I shamelessly steal from, and those include the work of someone like Naguib Mahfouz, or in a more contemporary realm, someone like Basma Abdel Aziz. These are writers who became very well versed in saying the things they needed to say, but also hiding the things they needed to say. I do that a lot in my work. American War is not a novel about the United States, but almost everyone in the US thinks it’s an American book, and that’s fine. There’s a lot more hiding underneath that.
If there’s one question you wish readers would ask — about your work, or the world — what would it be?
(laughs) I am always astounded that anybody wants to talk to me about anything. I love engaging with people about the literature they love, and I very rarely get to do it, in a literary interview. I would love for an interviewer to sit down and before asking a question go — “I have to tell you about this book I finished last night!!” So that is something I wish would come up more often.
Well, coincidentally, my next question is, if you were to create an “Omar El Akkad Reading List”, books that have influenced you as a writer, reader and a person — what books and authors would be on it?
Oh my God, I’m pretty sure as soon as I walk away after this interview, I’ll think of 10 more books I could have said.
To start off, my favourite book-length piece of non-fiction is A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan. It’s a brilliant book, which is basically an investigation of how the United States failed in Vietnam, but also on the hubris of empire and how empires fail in their misadventures. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. Before reading that book, I thought that a writer could either say something urgent, write in a fundamentally new way, or could create beautiful sentences but couldn’t do all three. But after reading [Song of Solomon], I realized if you’re good enough, which I’ll never be (laughs), you can do all three. The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz. One of the most photorealistic collections of books I’ve read in terms of accurately, precisely and surgically describing people and places in time. More recently, Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. Such a short, sharp book which is a marvellous example of writing against erasure but also dissecting how it happens.
I could do this for hours on end, so I’m going to stop and give you a break.
Rutvik Bhandari is an independent writer. He lives in Pune. He is a reader and a content creator. You can find him talking about books on Instagram and YouTube (@themindlessmess).
