Name: An Afternoon with Omar El Akkad (One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This)
Start: 2025-03-09T14:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-03-09T15:00:00-05:00
Location: 1120 Grant Avenue, Winnipeg, MB, Canada, Manitoba R3M 2A6

An Afternoon with Omar El Akkad (One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This)

Join us for a special afternoon with Omar El Akkad, author of American War and What Strange Paradise, as he visits Winnipeg to discuss his nonfiction debut, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (McClelland & Stewart), a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values. This event will feature a conversation hosted by David Bergen. A book signing will follow.
https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9780771021787/omar-el-akkad/one-day-everyone-will-have-always-been-against-this
This event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a YouTube stream: https://youtube.com/live/ClkdvWO0DmI
On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.
As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. He is a two-time winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award and the Oregon Book Award. His books have been translated into 13 languages. His debut novel, American War, was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world.