Date/Time: Wednesday 1st December 2021, 6.30pm to 7.30pm

Venue: Via YouTube - details to be sent on booking

Omar El Akkad will be reading from, and in conversation about his highly acclaimed novel, What Strange Paradise (Picador, 2021), a beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic and profoundly moving novel that brings the global refugee crisis down to the level of a child’s eyes.

‘Deserves to be an instant classic. I haven’t loved a book this much in a long time. What Strange Paradise reads as a parable for our times . . . Such beautiful writing . . . This is an extraordinary book.' New York Times

‘Riveting . . . Nothing I’ve read before has given me such a visceral sense of the grisly predicament confronted by millions of people expelled from their homes by conflict and climate change.’ Washington Post

El Akkad is an author and a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. He won Canada's National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in 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 won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.

Andrew Hankinson is a freelance journalist and award-winning nonfiction author. His most recent book is Don’t applaud. Either laugh or don’t. (At the Comedy Cellar.), which was described by the Atlantic as 'superb'. Andrew teaches creative writing at Newcastle University.

The event is free to attend, and all welcome.