One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Présentation

Novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad — whose What Strange Paradise won the Giller Prize — turns to the essay with this book, born of a viral 2023 tweet about the bombardment of Gaza. Part memoir of his own trajectory between Egypt, Qatar, Canada and the United States, part indictment of what he sees as the West's moral failure, it asks what it means to live inside an empire that does not consider you fully human. Winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction, this is an openly polemical, deeply personal essay : a thesis to be engaged with and argued against, not a survey — and a significant document of its moment.