Biography
Ayad Akhtar was born in New York in 1970 to Pakistani parents, grew up in Milwaukee and studied theatre and religion at Brown University; he then worked with Jerzy Grotowski in Italy and earned a master's degree in film directing at Columbia University. His first produced play, “Disgraced”, opened in Chicago in 2012 and won him the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; under its German title “Geächtet” it was voted best foreign play of 2016 in the Theater heute critics' poll, and in 2017 it earned him the Nestroy Theatre Prize for best play. His other plays, among them “The Who & The What”, “The Invisible Hand” and “Junk”, also revolve around Muslim-American identity, religion and economics; “Disgraced” and “Junk” were both nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play. As a novelist he published “American Dervish” in 2012 and “Homeland Elegies” in 2020, which received the American Book Award in 2021. He served as president of PEN America until 2023, and in 2024 his play “McNeal”, about a writer and artificial intelligence, opened on Broadway; Daniel Kehlmann translated it into German as “Der Fall McNeal”.
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