Born in Egypt, he has lived in Qatar and Canada and now resides in the United States. His life, marked by displacement and borders, has profoundly shaped both his journalism and his fiction. For almost a decade he worked as a reporter for The Globe and Mail, covering events including the war in Afghanistan, the detentions at Guantánamo Bay, the Arab Spring in Egypt and Black Lives Matter protests in cities across the United States. His debut novel, American War (Knopf, 2017), a dystopian vision of civil war and climate catastrophe in the United States, was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. What Strange Paradise (Penguin Random House, 2021), the story of a young Syrian refugee's struggle for survival, won the Giller Prize. His fiction has been translated into thirteen languages. His essay Algun dia, tothom hi haurà estat sempre en contra (L'Altra Editorial / Libros del Kultrum, 2025) denounces Western hypocrisy in the face of the Palestinian genocide and has earned El Akkad unanimous international recognition.