Ayad Akhtar is a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. Born in New York City and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he is the author of American Dervish, published in more than 20 languages worldwide and a 2012 Best Book of the Year at Kirkus Reviews, Toronto's Globe and Mail, Shelf-Awareness, and O (Oprah) Magazine. He is also a playwright and screenwriter. His stage play Disgraced played at New York's Lincoln Center Theater in 2012 and won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. As a screenwriter, he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay for The War Within. He is a graduate of Brown and Columbia Universities with degrees in Theater and Film Directing.
Genres: Literary Fiction
Plays show
Ayad Akhtar recommends
This Strange Eventful History (2024)
Claire Messud
"This Strange Eventful History is an astonishment-rich and luminous, dense with life, wide with wisdom. Messud's view of the Cassar family-and we suspect as we read it, her own-is as emotionally precise and imaginatively capacious as her rendering of the history that shapes their fortunes. Rarely has the private magic of familial love been so fully realized in a public act of literature. Just exquisite."
The Long Corner (2022)
Alexander Maksik
"Maksik updates Fowles' The Magus for the era of wellness, wealth and cultural impoverishment--a strange and haunting fable."
A Calling for Charlie Barnes (2021)
Joshua Ferris
"A deeply funny, very moving book about that most pivotal and permanent of destinations: death. Ferris's hijinks are serious; his play is profound. There is magic in these pages."
More recommendations
Visitors also looked at these authors