Omar El Akkad, a faculty member in Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program, is the recipient of one of the nation’s highest awards for literary excellence.
El Akkad received the 2025 National Book Award for nonfiction for his book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. The award was presented during the 76th National Book Awards ceremony on November 19 in New York.
A member of the Pacific MFA faculty since 2023, El Akkad delivered a discussion on the book last April as part of the university’s Whiteley Lecture Series on the Forest Grove Campus.
El Akkad’s first nonfiction book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This is a reckoning with the promises of the West and how, in his eyes, those promises will never be there for certain groups of human beings through his experience as an immigrant to the West and his work as a journalist covering such events as the War on Terror, the Black Lives Matter movement and the war in Israel.
The title is derived from an X post that El Akkad wrote on October 25, 2023, three weeks after Israel began its bombardment of Gaza: “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.”
In his acceptance speech, El Akkad acknowledged the important work that writers have to address the powers of oppression in the world.
“If we are to do this work of language, we have an obligation to stand in opposition to any force, including those enacted by our own governments, that if left unchecked would happily decimate every principle of free expression and connection that we’ve come here to celebrate,” El Akkad said.
One of the top honors for literacy excellence in the United States, the National Book Awards recognize and celebrate the best literature in the U.S. Awards are presented for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature. In 2025, publishers submitted 1,835 books for this year’s awards, including 652 in the nonfiction category.
El Akkad was born in Egypt and grew up in Qatar before moving to Canada and then the United States. He was a journalist for Canada’s The Globe & Mail newspaper, where he covered the war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Arab Spring movement in Egypt, and the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. He currently lives with his family near Portland.
Pacific’s low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing program allows burgeoning writers to enhance their craft with some of the best writers in the world. The two-year program provides lessons in writing craft with semester-long mentorship with faculty members that allow students to learn a sustainable and enduring practice of writing. The program includes two 10-day writing residencies each year: a January residency in Seaside and a June residency on the Forest Grove Campus.