| Omar Mouallem | |
| Birth Date: | 13 September 1985 |
| Birth Place: | Slave Lake, Alberta, Canada |
| Occupation: | Writer, Filmmaker |
Omar Mouallem is a Canadian writer[1] and filmmaker. He has contributed to Wired, The Guardian, NewYorker.com, and RollingStone.com. His essays and features have garnered him recognition from the Canadian National Magazine Awards and Alberta Literary Awards.[2] He co-authored a book about the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire titled Inside the Inferno: A Firefighter's Story of the Brotherhood that Saved Fort McMurray (published by Simon & Schuster Canada).[3] His book “Praying to the West: How Muslims Shaped the Americas,” a travelogue centred around 13 mosques, was named one of the best books of 2021 by The Globe and Mail.[4] It was awarded the 2022 Wilfred Eggelston Nonfiction Award by the Alberta Literary Awards.[5]
He has won three Canadian National Magazine Awards,[6] including best profile in 2014 for the Eighteen Bridges story, "The Kingdom of Haymour", which profiled a man who took the Canadian Embassy in Beirut hostage in the 1970s over a British Columbia land dispute.[1] The article partially inspired the 2020 documentary film “Eddy’s Kingdom”, for which Mouallem was a key interview. [7]
Mouallem directed and produced two documentaries, 2019’s Digging in the Dirt, a CBC coproduction about a mental health crises in the Alberta oil sands workforce, and 2021’s The Last Baron, a first-person film about the unlikely connection between Lebanon’s civil war and the Canadian fast-food chain Burger Baron.[8] After premiering on CBC Gem, it gained notable popularity and it was heralded as one of the “best Canadian food documentaries” by enRoute magazine.[9] Mouallem announced that the short film would be expanded into a feature documentary retitled The Lebanese Burger Mafia and released in 2023.[10]
In 2013, he won Edmonton's Emerging Artist Award and served as the Edmonton Public Library's writer in residence.[11] In 2022, he was awarded an Emerging Artists Award from the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta.[12]