Ayad Akhtar
Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright whose work — rooted in questions of Muslim American identity, capitalism, and belonging — has made him one of the most acclaimed American writers of his generation. Born in Staten Island, New York, in 1970, to Pakistani immigrant parents, Akhtar grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and went on to study at Brown University and the Columbia University School of the Arts.
He first gained major recognition as a playwright. His 2012 play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2013 and enjoyed a long Broadway run. The play, which takes place over the course of a dinner party at which a Pakistani-American lawyer confronts his own internalized prejudices and the prejudices of others, became one of the most produced plays in America for several seasons. His subsequent plays, including The Who and the What and Junk — the latter a sharp examination of 1980s leveraged buyout capitalism — further established his theatrical range.
Akhtar’s debut novel American Dervish (2012) follows a young Pakistani-American boy in Milwaukee as he navigates faith, identity, and a family friend’s influence. His 2020 novel Homeland Elegies is a formally experimental hybrid of memoir and fiction in which a character named “Ayad Akhtar” grapples with his father’s admiration for Donald Trump, with the seductions and violences of American capitalism, and with the experience of being Muslim in post-9/11 America. The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Foreign Policy Book of the Year award.
Akhtar is the president of PEN America and continues to write for both stage and page. He is recognized as one of the defining voices examining what it means to be an American at the intersection of Islam, immigration, and late capitalism.
