It’s Real, It’s Fiction, It’s A Paradox: Ayad Akhtar On His ‘Homeland Elegies’

Ayad Akhtar won a Pulitzer Prize for Disgraced, his play about a conflicted American Muslim man living in New York after Sept. 11.

The narrator’s name in the novel is also Ayad Akhtar, and the book reads like memoir. Akhtar says he had to “pilfer” from his own life to write a novel that had the “addictive thrill” of reality TV.

(Image credit: Vincent Tullo/Little, Brown And Company)

The narrator’s name in the novel is also Ayad Akhtar, and the book reads like memoir. Akhtar says he had to “pilfer” from his own life to write a novel that had the “addictive thrill” of reality TV.