About the Author
Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright whose work has been published and performed in over thirty languages. He is the author of American Dervish, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, and Homeland Elegies, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2020 by The New York Times. The Radiance, his forthcoming novel, will be published in Fall 2026. Akhtar’s plays include Disgraced, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, McNeal, Junk, The Who & The What, and The Invisible Hand.
The Radiance follows the awakening a writer undergoes after a hit-and-run shatters more than his body. His mind is caught between revelation and madness as an uncanny pull towards a brilliant colleague threatens to ensnare him into a destructive scandal. Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, The Radiance is of our American moment and beyond it.
The New York Times called Homeland Elegies “a beautiful novel…that had echoes of The Great Gatsby and that circles, with pointed intellect, the possibilities and limitations of American life.” Homeland Elegies was one of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2020. American Dervish, Akhtar’s first novel, received praise for its brilliant writing and nuanced look into the interplay of religion and modern life.
Akhtar’s plays have been mounted on Broadway, most recently McNeal featuring Robert Downey Jr during the 2024 Broadway season, and across the U.S. His plays have received many accolades and nominations including for the Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony Awards, Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle, and Olivier Awards.
Akhtar received the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors. He has also received fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, MacDowell, the Sundance Institute, and Yaddo, where he serves as a Board Director. He served as the President of PEN America from 2021 to 2023. In 2021, Akhtar was named the New York State Author, succeeding Colson Whitehead, by the New York State Writers Institute.
Raves and Reviews
Praise for The Radiance
The Radiance is a fantastic surprise, a novel made of oppositions: almost painfully intimate, culturally wide-angled, vulnerable, shrewd, compassionate and ruthless, tragic and well, radiant. Bordering at times on the ineffable, it is a unique and extraordinary reading experience.”
—Mary Gaitskill, author of The Devil’s Treasure
The Radiance is simply put a work of genius. Through unforgettable characters Akhtar explores the nature of memory and of the soul, while the unfolding tale builds tension and anticipation like a whodunit. The Radiance is hard to put down and so original it will linger with me for a long time.”
—Abraham Verghese, author of The Covenant of Water
Electric and unforgettable: Only Akhtar could navigate territory this fraught—power, obsession, violation, and desire—and emerge with a book this urgent and alive.”
—Tara Westover, New York Times bestselling author of Educated
A campus novel like no other, profound and beautiful, whose narrator weathers today’s chaos while circling the ultimate questions—and somehow fun as hell to read. This brilliant book left me awestruck.”
—Phil Klay, winner of the National Book Award for Redeployment
Praise for Homeland Elegies
An unflinchingly honest self-portrait by a brilliant Muslim-American writer, and, beyond that, an unsparing examination of both sides of that fraught hyphenated reality. Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable.”
—Salman Rushdie
An urgent, intimate hybrid of memoir and fiction, Homeland Elegies thrusts us into the heart of a father-son relationship and, in the process-improbably-does nothing short of laying bare the broken heart of our American dream turned reality TV nightmare. The book’s dissection of the deeply human desire to aspire and dream, and its illumination of the quest for success, brilliantly captures how we got to this exact moment in time and at what cost. Stunning.”
—A. M. Homes, author of This Book Will Save Your Life and Days of Awe
At the core of this flashing, kinetic coil of a story — part 1001 Nights, part Reality TV — is a passionate, wrenching portrayal of Americans exiled into ‘otherness’.”
—Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan Beach and A Visit From the Goon Squad
Paise for Disgraced: A Play
The best play I saw last year…. [a] quick-witted and shattering drama…. Disgraced rubs all kinds of unexpected raw spots with intelligence and humor.”
—Linda Winer, Newsday
Compelling… Disgraced raises and toys with provocative and nuanced ideas.”
—Jesse Oxfeld, New York Observer
[A] blistering social drama about the racial prejudices that secretly persist in progressive cultural circles.”
—Marilyn Stasio, Variety
Offers an engaging snapshot of the challenge for upwardly mobile Islamic Americans in the post-9/11 age.”
—Thom Geier, Entertainment Weekly
