Behind-the-Scenes of the Aspen Words Literary Prize with author Omar El Akkad

This blog contributed by BookGive volunteer and advisory council member, Colleen Maleski.

Award season continues this week with the reveal of the Aspen Words Literary Prize short list and the announcement of the Women’s Prize for Fiction long list. 

In January, I had the opportunity to talk with Omar El Akkad, the head of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize jury. He shared, with humor and humility, his perspectives on the Prize, his experiences with book awards, and recommendations of books that changed how he sees himself and the world. Omar is an author and former journalist whose books American War and What Strange Paradise have won many literary awards, including the Giller Prize, Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, Kobo Emerging Writer Award, and Oregon Book Award. American War was also named one of BBC’s Novels that Shaped our World. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. 

Your book What Strange Paradise was shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize in 2022, and you’re currently a member of the 2023 Literary Prize jury. How did you get involved in the jury and what can you tell us about the process? 

The Aspen Words Literary Prize is a spectacular award. It has a mission that is both very specific and also open to vast and varied interpretations. That combination was what was most appealing to me – usually you get one or the other. A Pulitzer, for example, is very open while other awards are very specific… a prize for the third novel by someone who lives in this zip code. The Aspen Words Prize has an element of both. 

I was honored to be asked, and I was invited to chair the jury which sounds impressive but really it means you’re the one sending the emails and scheduling the meetings. I have done a lot of juries in the past, mostly short stories and grants, and I was honestly really frightened of anything that involves full length books. Full length books are quite the commitment because I’m not just going to skim a few pages and make the decision. The jury is a fantastic group of writers and literary minds who are all familiar with the award and its history. In our first meeting, one of the questions put forward by a jury member was “how?” [is it possible to read all of these books in this timeframe]. There’s no magic bullet. You just dedicate a ton of time to reading. 

We find out the longlist a little bit ahead of the big public announcement, and during that time the publishers are sending the jury the books. For two to three weeks, we’re getting shipments. The order I received them in helped determine the arbitrary order I’ll read the books in. 

Our big decisions happen mid-February when we narrow the longlist. All the judges give their rankings a day ahead of the meeting to get a sense of where everyone stands. They are spectacular books; they are all really good books. On any given day, the shortlist could look different. Awards are a lot more subjective than we like to believe. In judging, there are subjective elements at play, like the order you read them in or if you read the book when you haven’t gotten any sleep or if it is the first book you’re reading from the list and you are excited. It makes a difference. Your perception of the book can be impacted by your own mood. 

All the longlisted books meet the Aspen Words’ mission – the bedrock of any award – so it comes down to: how much do I like this book and really… has this book knocked me off my feet? 

The Aspen Words Literary Prize focuses on an influential work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture. The Prize bills itself as “fiction with impact.” What do you see as the power of fiction in impacting social change? 

For me, hope and the possibility of change for the better is implicit in the act of writing and reading. I write a lot of depressing books and often get asked “where is the hope?” For me, hope is in the act of writing. When you sit down and write a single word, you assume that there will be someone on the other side to read it. 

The most change-inspiring act of literature happens at the earliest possible stage – when someone picks up the book. That’s the change – as soon as you pick up a book and you’re willing to read it, when you’re willing to give your time to someone else’s story. It is before you have ever read a word of the book. 

Being both a journalist and author, how does the role fiction plays in social change compare with the role of journalism? 

I think my biggest distinction between the two is in the short-charged spike of journalism vs. the long tail of fiction. 

When I was a journalist, I wanted to write stories that were concerned with social justice and issues that if you had not heard about them from me, you wouldn’t have heard about them from someone else. I didn’t want to be doing Apple’s new product announcement with 400 other journalists (though I did my fair share of those too). 

News stories come out and have a short life. Most of the time, within a couple of days, they’re “wrapping the fish with it,” as they say. 

With novels, it is a much longer tail. My first novel came out in 2017, and I still get emails about it from readers who have picked it up for the first time or others who have gone back to it later and read it in a different light. That flexibility, that longer life span is something that fiction brings to the table. 

The other thing fiction brings – in a deceptive way – is how it pulls the wires in the reader’s head. There are ways that novels have changed me that I didn’t realize until years later. 

What Song of Solomon told me about the power of names – the names you’re given vs. the names you choose for yourself – that took me years to realize. The long span of a book’s impact on you is really powerful. 

Both American War and What Strange Paradise spur thought and conversations on issues that are relevant today – climate change, a divided country, refugees and immigration. What was your approach in crafting these two pieces of fiction to illuminate social issues and spur discussions and thoughts about those issues for your readers?

I write about things that make me angry, and the problem is that I’m not James Baldwin. I don’t have the talent of taking the things that make me angry and turning them into something profound. Anger is a form of heat and you can see in both my novels the scorch marks, the places where anger got away from me. In that way, even though American War and What Strange Paradise are two very different books, they have that in common. They are born of something that upset me deeply on a systemic level. 

With American War, it was the sense of thinking of people on the other side of the planet as essentially disposable. With What Strange Paradise, it was about thinking of people on the other side of the planet as essentially disposable. I just wrote them in two very different forms. 

Generally, I try to do an inversion or something that attempts to keep it from just being the story that it started out as in my head. With American War, it was to move it to the United States. In What Strange Paradise, it was to make it a fable and to have this fantastical element running through it. American War has been far more commercially successful because I played the trick of taking the stuff happening “over there” and setting it in the U.S., and people think of it as a fundamentally American book as a result.

You have won and been nominated or shortlisted for a number of awards for both American War and What Strange Paradise. What impact has it had on you as an author to be nominated or selected for the awards? 

Awards are a strange beast for a lot of writers. One of the things is that they give you a little bit of financial security – not only the prize check, but the publicity that results from the prize results in more sales. It is a huge help in an industry where most people working don’t make enough to live off their writing. I essentially set my career on fire after I sold my first novel. I was told “never quite your day job,” and I immediately quit my day job. Writing stories was all I ever wanted to do, so I quit my job as a reporter. Most writers of fiction, their careers are very up and down. Most don’t have book deals. It’s a very uncertain kind of way to live, which is maybe one thing if you’re 20 with no kids, but I’m 41 with two kids. 

But there are other benefits. Just to be mentioned in the same sentence with these exceptional writers – people who are my heroes – it is hard to overstate what it means to me on a psychological level to be in the same room or be on the same shortlist.  

I’ve lost way more awards than I’ve won. I think it is a 10:1 ratio. But writing is very lonely work. You sit alone in a room and write some, then delete most of it. This goes on for years, and then you find out if it is any good or not. That can be hard psychologically, and another benefit of awards is that every now and then, you get to be in a room with other writers and to have a community. It’s good for the soul. 

Beyond this year’s Aspen Words long list, what are some books you’ve read that have given you new perspective on a societal issue? What novels would make your list of “books that shaped your world?”

On my all-time list, my favorite work of fiction is A Death in the Family by James Agee. It was published posthumously and won the Pulitzer. It is about a family. The husband/father dies suddenly, and it is about the aftermath of that. It is the most emotionally surgical book I’ve ever read. I adore that book on a sentence level and on an emotional level. 

My favorite work of nonfiction is A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan. It is essentially the story of the Vietnam War and America’s spectacular disaster there, told through the biography of a single person – the top ranked American civilian in Vietnam. This book almost killed Neil Sheehan. His life fell apart over the decades it took to research it, but it is the most thorough piece of journalism I’ve ever read. It’s not just an explanation of everything that happened in Vietnam, but the American mindset when it comes to the rest of the world. I’ve never read anything like it. The appendix, the footnotes alone are hundreds of pages. 

More recently, The Return of Faraz Ali by Aamina Ahmad was probably the best novel I read last year. I reviewed it for the New York Times early last year. It is about a detective in 1960s Pakistan who is dispatched to the red light district to cover up the murder of a 12-year-old girl because some powerful people did it. He goes there and develops a conscious and decides not to do it, and everything goes to hell from there. An amazing piece of fiction. 

It’s up there with If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga, which is a debut novel by one of the best young writers in the world today. She’s Egyptian and I’m Egyptian, so I’m a bit biased, but Noor is going to have an incredible career. The story is about an American Egyptian who returns to Egypt and feels like a foreigner in her home. Structurally, it is so interesting, the things she does with form. That book got a lot of attention in Canada and the U.S. It won the First Novel Prize, and I still think it is underrated. 

Next Steps 

Look for one of Omar’s recommendations or a book from the Aspen Words short list during your next visit to the BookGive Free Book Room, and add them to your to-be-read pile beside the 1,930 books community members received in our March pop-up book giveaway! 

Help to make these and other books accessible to more Denver readers by becoming a Page Turner. For just $10 a month, you can help BookGive to purchase books that our community partners are asking for, such as large print, Spanish language, and books with diverse characters and storylines.