Ayad Akhtar finds success when he returns to his roots

Ayad Akhtar’s writing career may have begun with a whimper, but aspiring writers and literary historians may someday study his early years for clues to his eventual meteoric rise. In a freshman-year fiction class at the University of Rochester, in New York, Akhtar’s professor urged him to send one of his short stories to The New Yorker for publication. “I never sent it, I was too scared,” the 41-year-old recalled during a recent interview at the American Theatre Company on Chicago’s North Side. “I felt I was going to be called out as a fake. So I stopped writing and didn’t write for seven years.” Akhtar fell into theatre, teaching acting in New York and Europe before studying film and writing screenplays. He gained confidence, life experience and a firmer grasp of drama. Then, several years ago, he found his voice and tapped into a geyser of creativity. His script for the 2005 film The War Within – in which he played the lead role – earned several screenwriting honours. More recently, critics have lavished praise on his recently published debut novel, American Dervish. His first play has won mostly positive notices since its late January premiere in Chicago, and its producers hope to move it to Broadway. To top it off, another Akhtar play will debut in the United States in March. “This is an embarrassment of riches that I don’t understand,” he says with a shrug and a bewildered grin. “I think this business, show business, is a business of attrition. Sooner or later your relationships, your craft and your voice will coalesce into something, but you have to stick it out.” Born in 1970 outside Milwaukee, Akhtar grew up in a mostly white, well-to-do suburb. Both of his Punjab-born parents worked as doctors. Much like the parents of Hayat Shah, the 10-year-old, Milwaukee-reared protagonist of his novel, Akhtar’s parents maintained a certain distance from the local Pakistani community, and from Islam. Today, Akhtar lives in New York City’s Harlem. He is slim and poised, with long, elegant fingers and a standard expression of Midwestern welcome. He moves with an actor’s deliberateness and speaks with the confidence of a man in firm grasp of his art. He remembers being drawn to Islam at nine years old. “There was something about the Quran and stories of the Prophet that pointed at an unfathomable depth of experience,” he says, before recalling a less austere touchstone from that period. “In the Empire Strikes Back, Yoda’s discourses on reality with Luke Skywalker resonated in the same way.” A similarly open-minded approach to identity stands out in his work. In Dervish, a key Jewish character considers converting to Islam for marriage, while the young protagonist negotiates between the minimalist Islam of his parents, the devout Islam of a live-in family friend and the liberated Muslim adolescents of 1980s Wisconsin. After swearing off writing, Akhtar transferred to Brown University, in Rhode Island, to study theatre. He earned a film degree from Columbia University and, by age 25, had become a struggling screenwriter. “I worked with all these amazing producers and got beat up,” says Akhtar, citing executives from Lars von Trier’s Zentropa Pictures and Mark Burnett, of reality TV fame, among his mentors. “That four-year apprenticeship in writing screenplays taught me so much.” The main lesson may have been a shift in perspective. After years of writing about external, less familiar subjects, he returned to his own life, to Pakistani-Americans, and writing became a joy. “At some point I realised I was avoiding who I really was, and that’s when people started connecting with my work,” says Akhtar.