Ayad Akhtar is a novelist, screenwriter, and dramatist. He is the author of the novel American Dervish, and his screenplay for the film The War Within was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award in 2006. Disgraced, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2013, The Who & The What and The Invisible Hand, both of which had Off-Broadway runs and are being staged across the world, and Junk, which was produced at Lincoln Center in 2017. He lives in New York City.