How was meeting your champion, Tareq Hadhad? For all of my insecurities about having celebrities talk about my book in public, I'm a huge fan of the whole endeavour. This whole thing is so unique and it's just an incredible privilege. I talk a lot about this notion of how anxious this makes me, but that's just because I'm a naturally anxious person. The fact that people are passionate about this is really heartening.Īnd, the fact that our public broadcaster dedicates a week of programming to have people talk about books - that's such a miraculous and rare thing. This thing gets pretty intense sometimes, but the fact that people are passionate enough to get intense about books offsets any of the mentions that show up in my Twitter notifications. Is there anything you'd like to say to Twitter this year, something to keep in mind as they watch the show?įeel free to yell at me as much as you like. I'm deeply grateful to be in this kind of company and deeply anxious about how this thing's going to play out. It's kind of a mechanism of attention and spotlight that I'm not used to at all. My very limited experience with Canada Reads for my one previous rodeo is that you're subjected to this kind of very communal form of feedback that exists not only in the panellists's conversations, but also the folks that pop up on Twitter and take this very seriously. I'm equal parts deeply grateful and deeply anxious. His latest novel is What Strange Paradise, which won the 2022 Ken Kesey Award for Fiction.How are you feeling about being on Canada Reads again? It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His work earned Canada’s National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world.

Omar El Akkad is an author and a journalist.

Omar el akkad novels