Ayad Akhtar
Ayad Akhtar
Ayad Akhtaris a Pakistani American playwright, novelist, screenwriter and actor who is best known for his play, Disgraced. The play received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play, and was named the most produced play in America for the 2015-16 Season. Akhtar's work covers various themes including the human condition, love, responsibility, relationships, the American-Muslim experience, economics, immigration, identity, and aspects of culture...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth28 October 1970
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.
In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not.
I consider myself to have been formed by a lot of the locutions and aesthetics and principles of the Muslim way of life, and those are an important part of my childhood and my identity.
I can't be a spokesman for anything other than my own concerns. I have to be free to wrestle with my own preoccupations, and if I'm bringing any political awareness to that process, that mitigates my freedom.
I'm a storyteller. I feel like the issue of discourse is an important one because there's a lot of political and ideological discourse that goes around, and we relate to that on an intellectual level.
Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human.
I feel like that religions generally ask the biggest questions. They may not always have the best answers, but they're the zone of human activity that regularly asks the biggest questions.
I feel like one of the things that is central to American life is the religious experience, and I think that the experience of being Muslim in America is as valid and as important a perspective on the religious experience of America as evangelical Christianity or Judaism - whatever it may be.
The secret of a happy life is respect. Respect for yourself and respect for others.
Sooner or later we've all got to confront the reality that we have got to come to understand who we are and what we're doing, and the extent to which we are guided or manipulated by forces that are beyond our control.
I started to understand that for me, art was no longer about self-expression but about creative engagement with the world. I started to respond in an excited way to making work inside an industry and not feeling the constraints of audience expectation as some kind of thing that I should avoid.
I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.