Showing results by narrator "Omar El Akkad" in All Categories

From cultural icon Margaret Atwood comes a brilliant collection of essays - funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient - which seek answers to burning questions. In over 50 pieces Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. This roller-coaster period brought the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump, and a pandemic.

As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege.

Omar El Akkad joins us in the Audible Studios to discuss his debut novel, American War. Having spent 10 years as a journalist reporting on subjects such as the war in Afghanistan and military trials in Guantanamo Bay, Omar has turned his attentions to dystopian fiction in American War. Set in 2074, the novel portrays a world where climate change and political uprisings have transformed everything as we know it - and civil war has broken out in America.