Canongate wins Omar El Akkad's One Day… which heats up FBF day one

After a “heated” five-way auction, Canongate c.e.o.Jamie Byng has acquired UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) to the “urgent and necessary” first non-fiction book from award-winning novelist Omar El Akkad. The deal for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This was concluded with Caspian Dennis of Abner Stein on behalf of Nicole Aragi of Aragi, Inc.

Rights have also gone to Knopf in the US, McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Feltrinelli in Italy. Canongate has since licensed the book to Text Publishing in Australia. The anglophone publishers will launch their editions simultaneously in late February 2025.

Egypt-born, Qatar-raised and US-based El Akkad’s new work is a reckoning “about what it means to live in the West today”. As an immigrant, Canongate said, “El Akkad believed the West would be a place of freedom and justice for all. But in the past 20 years, reporting on the various wars on terror, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, he has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie."
Byng said: “I have been running Canongate for over 30 years and Omar El Akkad’s book feels like the most urgent book I have read on submission during this time.”  

El Akkad’s novels have won the Pacific Northwest Book Award and the Oregon Book Award and have been translated into 13 languages. His debut, American War (2017), was named by the BBC as one of 100 novels that shaped our world, and his second, What Strange Paradise (2022), won the Giller Prize.