Omar El Akkad has won the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

The National Book Awards, the annual American literary prizes administered by the National Book Foundation, honour the best fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature published each year. Winners of the National Book Awards receive $10,000 (U.S.), a bronze medal, and a statue.

El Akkad was one of five finalists for this year’s nonfiction prize. He was named the winner for his nonfiction debut, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This – about which he spoke to Q&Q earlier this year – at a ceremony in New York City on Nov. 19. In the book, published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House Canada, El Akkad interrogates the rights and freedoms of the West that he now sees as compromised by its official response to the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

“It’s very difficult to think in celebratory terms about a book that was written in response to a genocide. It’s difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have spent two years seeing what shrapnel does to a child’s body. It is difficult to think in celebratory terms when I know that my tax money is doing this, and that many of my elected representatives happily support it. And it is difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have been watching people snatched off the street by masked agents of the state for daring to suggest that Palestinians might be human beings,” El Akkad said in accepting the award. “I am nonetheless deeply grateful to the writers who have spoken out … people who remind me daily that 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 come here to celebrate.”

The other nonfiction finalists – Julia Ioffe for Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, Yiyun Li for Things in Nature Merely Grow, Claudia Rowe for Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care, and Jordan Thomas for When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World – each receive $1,000 (U.S.) and a bronze medal.