One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Omar El Akkad is an award-winning author and investigative journalist who was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the US. He believed in the promises of the West—freedom from authoritarianism, equality for all—but over time, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie.
On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad tweeted, “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” It has been viewed more than 10 million times.
El Akkad's book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This won the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction. It is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the US, as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.
—Adapted from Penguin Random House
About Omar El Akkad
Omar El Akkad has written for the Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. It has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, Washington Post, GQ, NPR and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.
His critically acclaimed second novel, What Strange Paradise, won the Scotiabank Giller prize and the Oregon Book Award for fiction. His nonfiction debut, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, was published in February 2025 and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and is a national bestseller.
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*Photo credit Kateshia Pendergrass