Omar El Akkad, author of Such Strange Paradise and Stories from the Center of the World, has won the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, his reflection on the Israel-Hamas war and what it means to live in a West that betrays its values. The award was announced Wednesday night at the 76th Annual National Book Awards Ceremony presented by the National Book Foundation in New York City.
The award adds to a growing list of accolades for El Akkad, who lived in Canada before moving to Portland, where he has lived and worked for several years and is an active presence in the literary community.
In his acceptance speech, El Akkad thanked his mother, wife, and children for their support and spoke candidly about his work, noting that celebrating the book felt counterintuitive given its difficult topic. He spoke about the importance of free speech and expressed deep appreciation for his fellow writers and nominees, saying he draws “so much courage” from others in the room.
The award carries a $10,000 prize. El Akkad was among nine finalists from among the 652 nonfiction nominees. Publishers submitted a total of 1,835 books in five categories for this year’s awards.
Another Portlander was also a finalist, in the fiction category: Karen Russell, for The Antidote, which follows the story of a historic dust storm that devastates a small Nebraska town and the “Prairie Witch” who holds the memories and secrets for the residents of this town.
Both El Akkad and Russell appeared earlier this month at the Portland Book Festival, where they appeared together in a panel on “American Reckoning.”
Another attendee at the Portland Book Festival, Patricia Smith, received the poetry award for her collection The Intentions of Thunder. Other winners announced Wednesday were Rabih Alameddine in fiction for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), a multigenerational epic; Daniel Nayeri, in young people’s literature, for The Teacher of Nomad Land; and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, in translated literature, for We Are Green and Trembling, translated by Robin Myers.
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Thank you for this good news about Omar El Akkad’s award at this acute time of international crisis. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe he would refer to this as the “Israel-Hamas War.” That frame is exactly the problem. This is not a war. It is a genocide in violation of international human rights agreements, a brutal, sadistic ethnic cleansing campaign that began 75 years ago and continues daily–with full support from the US military, political, and media establishments. His work challenges all of us to be clear and forthright.
Thank you for your positivity. My take is that this book is more than “a blistering reflection on the Israel-Hamas war.” It certainly is that, but it’s also a very personal accounting of our failure as a nation to achieve our ideals. We have failed to walk the talk, and that is something we must look at and act to correct. “It’s very difficult to think in the celebratory terms, a book that was written in response to a genocide,” he said in his acceptance speech. “It’s difficult to think in celebratory terms when I’ve spent two years seeing what shrapnel does to a child’s body. It is difficult to think in celebratory terms when I know that my tax money is doing this and that many of my elected representatives happily support it, and it is difficult to think in celebratory terms, and I have been watching people snatched off the streets by masked agents of the state for daring to suggest that Palestinians might be human beings.”