Ayad Akhtar

Vice President, PEN America Board of Trustees

Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright, and has served as PEN America’s president since 2021. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Akhtar is the author of Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown & Co.), which The Washington Post called “a tour de force” and The New York Times called “a beautiful novel…that had echoes of The Great Gatsby and that circles, with pointed intellect, the possibilities and limitations of American life.” His first novel, American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), was published in over 20 languages. As a playwright, he has written Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony nomination); Disgraced (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination); The Who & The What (Lincoln Center); and The Invisible Hand (NYTW; Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, Olivier, and Evening Standard nominations).

Among other honors, Akhtar is the recipient of the Steinberg Playwrighting Award, the Nestroy Award, the Erwin Piscator Award, as well as fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, MacDowell, the Sundance Institute, and Yaddo, where he serves as a Board Director. Additionally, Ayad is a Board Trustee at New York Theatre Workshop, and was named the New York State Author, succeeding Colson Whitehead, by the New York State Writers Institute.


Articles by Ayad Akhtar

Thursday November 2

Protecting the Real Georgian Dream

Georgia’s artists and curators and writers are drawing attention to compromised freedom of expression, shrinking civic space, and erosion of democracy in their country.

Monday August 7

In Defense of Literary Imagination

We believe that it is possible to move boldly forward for equity in publishing without disavowing individual books and applying new moral litmus tests to stanch ideas deemed offensive.

Monday December 5

On War and Cultural Erasure

PEN America President Ayad Akhtar reflects on the cultural destruction that has taken place in Ukraine at the hands of Russian Tsars and Soviet leaders.