Omar El Akkad, the Egyptian-born novelist and journalist, has been named a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
His nominated book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, explores the responses of the United States and Europe to the destruction in Gaza. Combining reportage, analysis, and reflection, the work examines how global politics and public conscience have shaped the narrative around the region’s devastation.
The National Book Foundation announced 25 finalists across five categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature. Other nonfiction finalists include Julia Ioffe for Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, From Revolution to Autocracy; Yiyun Li for Things in Nature Merely Grow; Claudia Rowe for Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care; and Jordan Thomas for When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World.
Omar El Akkad, born in Cairo in 1982 and raised in Doha, is an Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist whose work bridges global conflict and personal displacement. After moving to Canada at sixteen, he studied computer science at Queen’s University and spent a decade as a reporter for The Globe and Mail, covering the war in Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, and Black Lives Matter protests in the United States.
His debut novel, American War (2017), was praised by The New York Times for its haunting realism and later named one of the BBC’s 100 most influential novels. He went on to win the 2021 Giller Prize for What Strange Paradise, a story of migration and survival centered on a young Syrian refugee. El Akkad’s latest book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, about the 2024 war on Gaza was shortlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Winners of the 2025 National Book Awards will be announced at a November ceremony in New York.
Congratulations, Omar El Akkad!
Bakare Oluwatobiloba
I write to educate, motivate and define history with literature. Just being me!
