Egyptian-Canadian author Omar El Akkad wins $100,000 for ‘What Strange Paradise’
What Strange Paradise“I was talking to my mom earlier. The last time she was in a room watching me win an award was 31 years ago, which is distressing by anyone’s standards. Mom, this is yours,” Mr. El Akkad said moments after being announced as the winner of the $100,000 award – Canada’s richest fiction prize – Monday night.
“And then I tried my best to remember what it was to walk and put one foot in front of the other. And I went up to the stage and gave what I’m sure was a completely mangled speech.” “Fiction was always my first home,” he said in an earlier interview. “I’m one of those people who doesn’t have a very good answer to the question ‘where are you from.’ I’ve been a guest on someone else’s land since I was five years old. And I’ve always found that fiction – where you can sort of alter the contours of your invented world to fit whatever reality you’d like – always felt more like home to me than any real place.
“Daily as I was writing, I was seeing this immense and systemic cruelty along the borders of the country that I live in now. And it heavily informed the way that I thought about the kind of universality of that cruelty.”What Strange Paradise
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