NEW YORK (AP) — National Book Awards judges honored authors worldwide on Wednesday night, including Egyptian-Canadian novelist-journalist Omar El Akkad.

The writer, who now lives in Oregon, received the non-fiction award for his fierce indictment of the contemporary West, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.”

El Akkad told the gathering in New York City that it was “very difficult to think in celebratory terms about a book that was written in response to a genocide (in Gaza). It’s difficult to think in celebratory terms when I spent two years seeing what shrapnel does to a child’s body.”

The book is a contemporaneous account of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as seen from the other side of the world and a sharp critique of the West’s response to the war.

Other winners in

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