The Markaz Review seeks to partner with and support the many likeminded platforms that celebrate SWANA literature, arts and ideas, and with that in mind, presents here a powerful podcast conversation with Omar El Akkad, conducted by Ursula Lindsey and Marcia Lynx Qualey, of the Bulaq podcast.
Novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad wrote a powerful essay that dissects Western liberalism and the genocide in Gaza. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This won the National Book Award in November 2025. One Day, as Bulaq co-hosts Ursula Lindsey and Marcia Lynx Qualey note, is “a blend of memoir, social criticism, and moral philosophy. The book creates and shares space for everyone who is full of grief and rage, who cannot be at home in institutions that support or ignore genocide.” Lindsey and Lynx Qualey discuss the linguistic obfuscations around Gaza, El Akkad’s critique of Western liberalism, and the possibilities for a different future.
Omar El Akkad was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, moved to Canada as a teenager and now lives in the United States. The start of his journalism career coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade he reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay and many other locations around the world. His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR and several other publications. It was also selected by the BBC as one of 100 novels that changed our world. His second novel, What Strange Paradise won the Giller Prize. the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. His short story “The Icarist” is included in Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction (City Lights), edited by Jordan Elgrably.
Ursula Lindsey is a reporter, essayist and book reviewer who largely writes about North Africa and the Middle East, where she has lived for two decades. She is from California but grew up in Rome, and has lived in Cairo and Amman. She is the co-host of the Bulaq podcast, along with Marcia Lynx Qualey, who cofounded ArabLit in 2009. Marcia Lynx Qualey is a writer, publisher, editor, translator, and speaker. She has published essays and short fiction in a number of magazines, including Ploughshares, AGNI, and The Ex-Puritan. She founded ArabLit, which won a “Literary Translation Initiative” award at the 2017 London Book Fair and an Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature in 2024.
