Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt, and grew up in Doha, Qatar. When he was 16 years old, he moved to Canada, subsequently completing high school in Montreal and college at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. He has a computer science degree. For ten years he was a staff reporter for The Globe and Mail, where he covered the War in Afghanistan, military trials at Guantanamo Bay and the Arab Spring in Egypt. He was most recently a correspondent for the western United States, where he covered Black Lives Matter.

His first novel, American War, was published in 2017. It received positive reviews from critics; The New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani compared it favourably to Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Philip Roth's novel The Plot Against America. The Globe and Mail called it "a masterful debut."The novel was named a shortlisted finalist for the 2017 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.