Southernmost Louisiana is about 100 miles north of where it currently is. The capital has been moved from Washington DC inland to Columbus, Ohio. The America of the late part of this century has been ravaged by climate change. Omar El Akkad: In the book, the Second American Civil War is fought about five or six decades from now, and it’s fought primarily over fossil fuel use. When we talked in 2017, I had him explain what prompted the Second Civil War. So we thought we would take this moment to listen back to our interview about his first book. He recently won an Oregon book award for his second novel, What Strange Paradise. The novel is called American War, and it’s the story of the Second American Civil War, which in El Akkad’s telling ranges from 2074 to the year 2095.Įl Akkad lives in Portland. He wrote a novel, a terrifyingly realistic one that’s set in the second half of the 21st century. El Akkad’s book is not based on his reporting, at least not directly.

There are drones, and suicide bombers, and teeming refugee tent cities full of desperate people grieving for lost loved ones, and hoping for a path to peace. You can see a lot of the themes from that reporting on display in his first book. He covered the Arab Spring in Egypt, military trials at Guantanamo Bay, refugee camps in Afghanistan, and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. Omar El Akkad is a former foreign correspondent for Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper. Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.ĭave Miller : This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. Local author Omar El Akkad recently won the Oregon Book Award for his latest novel “What Strange Paradise.” Today we listen back to a conversation with El Akkad from 2017 about his first novel “American War.” The book imagines a near future in which the country is fighting a second civil war.

Author omar el akkad