Omar El Akkad won the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize, widely considered Canada’s most prestigious literary award, for his novel What Strange Paradise, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports. 
El Akkad’s novel, which was published in the U.S. by Knopf in July, follows a 9-year-old Syrian refugee who’s rescued from a shipwreck by a teenage girl. A critic for Kirkus called the book “incisive” and “a compassionate snapshot of one Syrian refugee's struggle to plot a course for home.”
“For the next couple of minutes, that will be very, very awkward, you will realize that I didn’t think I had a chance in hell at this, and so I’m making the speech up as I go along,” El Akkad said, accepting the award. “For the past few months, I’ve had the incredible honor of being mentioned in the same breath as four outstanding authors, any of whom could be standing up here right now. It is by far the greatest honor of my career."
The award jury praised El Akkad’s novel as “unflinching and tender.”
"In examining the confluence of war, migration and a sense of settlement, it raises questions of indifference and powerlessness and, ultimately, offers clues as to how we might reach out empathetically in a divided world,” the jury said.
The Giller Prize, established in 1994 and sponsored by Scotiabank since 2005, is given annually to a work of English-language fiction by a Canadian author. It comes with a cash prize of about $80,000 U.S.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
