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Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development

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This information is taken from the AYAD website

http://www.ayad.com.au/home

• 1 Introduction
• 2 What is AYAD?
• 3 A Brief History
• 4 Want to Volunteer Overseas?
• 5 Frequently Asked Questions

Introduction [ ]

The Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development (AYAD) Program is an Australian Government, AusAID, initiative, that provides skilled young Australians the opportunity to volunteer overseas in Asia, the Pacific and Africa. The AYAD Program supports the Millennium Development Goals and is committed to achieving sustainable development through capacity building, skills exchange and institutional strengthening.

What is AYAD? [ ]

The Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development (AYAD) Program aims to strengthen mutual understanding between Australia and the countries of Asia, the Pacific and Africa and make a positive contribution to development. The Program achieves these aims by placing skilled young Australians (18-30) on short-term assignments in developing countries in Asia, the Pacific and Africa. AYAD volunteers work with local counterparts in Host Organisations to achieve sustainable development outcomes through capacity building, skills transfer and institutional strengthening. Every year, the AYAD Program places 400 young Australians on short-term assignments (3-12 months) in developing countries across Asia the Pacific and Africa. AYADs work with local counterparts in partner Host Organisations to achieve sustainable development outcomes through capacity building, skills transfer and institutional strengthening.

AYAD assignments cover a diverse range of sectors including Education, Environment, Gender, Governance, Health, Infrastructure, Rural Development and Trades. The AYAD Program is an Australian Government, AusAID initiative and is fully funded by the Australian Government’s overseas aid agency, AusAID.

A Brief History [ ]

The AYAD Program was launched on the 28th of August 1998. The goal of the AYAD Program is to strengthen mutual understanding between Australia and the countries of Asia, the Pacific and Africa and make a positive contribution to development. The Program does this through four main objectives: 1. To provide opportunities for young Australians to contribute to Australia's overseas aid program and to gain personal and professional experience in developing countries. 2. To build the capacity of individuals, organisations and communities in partner countries through sharing skills and knowledge. 3. To foster linkages and partnerships between organisations and communities in Australia and those in developing countries. 4. To raise public awareness of development issues and the Australian aid program in the Australian community. The AYAD Program was piloted for two years until 2000 when, buoyed by the success and achievements of the Program in providing outstanding opportunities for young Australians and positive contributions to development in Asia, the Pacific and Africa, it was decided to continue and expand upon the AYAD Program as an integral part of the Australian Government's overseas aid program. The AYAD Program was put out to tender and Austraining International was the successful tenderer. Since that time Austraining International has successfully retendered for the AYAD Program (in 2006) and continues to manage the AYAD Program on behalf of AusAID. The AYAD Program has worked in 21 different countries throughout its history and continues to respond to emerging needs and priorities of the Australian aid program and partner countries.

Want to Volunteer Overseas? [ ]

Every year the AYAD Program supports 400 young skilled Australians to volunteer overseas in Asia, The Pacific and Africa. The Program is open to any Australian citizen aged between 18-30 who wants to live and work overseas and make a difference. Volunteer assignments are 3-12 months depending on which assignment is undertaken.

The Program, funded by AusAID, provides:

• Living allowances
• Training before, during and after your volunteer assignment
• Medical and emergency support whilst in-country
• In country support to help you settle in

So if you're interested in volunteering overseas and making a difference, the AYAD program may be for you!

Click through to find out more about Becoming an AYAD and our Latest Assignments .

Or register for one of our Info Sessions now!

Frequently Asked Questions [ ]

I am 30 years of age - am I still eligible to apply for the AYAD Program?

The age restriction of 18- 30 is inclusive, which means so long as you turn 31 after applications close you are eligible to apply for the AYAD Program.

Do I need to be an Australian Citizen to apply?

In order to apply for the AYAD Program, you need to be an Australian Citizen.

Can I undertake a one or two month assignment during my University holidays?

All AYAD assignments are 3-12 months. All AYAD Volunteers are mobilised (go in country) over three intakes per year in March, July and October.

I am applying for more than one assignment, can list them according to preference?

Unfortunately you cannot rank your applications in order of preference. Only apply for assignments you are willing to undertake. The selection panel will place you in a role they feel you are best suited to based on your skills and experience.

Can I email my application to AYAD?

All applications submitted to the AYAD Program need to be full applications and need to be hard copy, paper based applications. For more information about applying, please see Applying to AYAD .

Can you find an assignment which suits my skills if I email you my CV?

The AYAD Program is unable to provide applicants with any guidance in regards to the type of assignment they would be best suited to.

Why are there no assignments listed for China and Nepal in the assignments mobilising in July?

Assignments in China and Nepal are not advertised in all three intakes, they are only listed in two of the three intakes per year.

How can I find out more about the AYAD Program and how to apply?

The AYAD Program holds information sessions throughout Australia three times per year, before assignments are advertised online. Visit Information Sessions for further details. An information pack can also be downloaded which contains further information about the AYAD Program.

Can I create my own assignment?

It is not possible for a prospective volunteer to create their own assignment. AYAD Volunteer assignments are created by Host Organisations and In-Country Managers. Host Organisations identify a need within their organisation for a volunteer and develop an assignment proposal which they submit to the AYAD Program.

I do not have a University Degree - can I still apply?

The AYAD Program aims to send "skilled young Australians" on its volunteer assignments and while most assignments will specify university qualifications as a measurement tool, we recognise the value of professional and life experience when reviewing applicants for a position.

Can I be added to the mailing list?

To register your interest in the AYAD Program to receive correspondance regarding updates about the AYAD Program, click here to register your details.

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• 3 Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development

The end of AYAD: youth ambassador program retired

Ashlee Betteridge

With minimal fanfare, the Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development (AYAD) brand was retired as of July 1, in line with the recommendation of the Office of Development Effectiveness evaluation released earlier this year.

The former AYAD program has now been rolled into the wider Australian Volunteers for International Development (AVID) program, without a dedicated stream or assignments for people under 30.

If you try to go to AYAD’s website, you simply get redirected to Austraining’s main volunteer site for its portion of the AVID program (AVID is also delivered by Red Cross and Australian Volunteers International). There is now a special tab for ‘ early career opportunities ’—these are assignments that require three years or less of professional experience. But they are open to anyone regardless of age.

During our forum on the ODE evaluation in March, there were questions raised on whether there would be any kind of quota on assignments targeted to younger people, as there were concerns that they would not be able to compete with more experienced candidates. From a quick glance, it is hard to tell if the proportion of early career assignments is similar to what it was in the past and there has been no mention in public of any kind of quota.

Considering that the evaluation advocated for more involvement of even younger people than the current AYAD average (Stephen Howes criticised this in one of his posts on the evaluation), this seems like a curious way to achieve this.

In its management response to the evaluation, DFAT itself also committed to “expand the availability of volunteering to those from regional and rural areas, Indigenous Australians and youth from the younger age range (18 to 24 years of age compared to AYAD’s 18 to 30 years of age)”. It is still unclear how this will be carried out.

With or without AYAD, AVID is still confusing anyway. For outsiders, the whole Austraining versus Red Cross versus AVI thing makes very little sense. AYAD seemed like the stronger brand compared to AVID, with a more vibrant alumni network—yet AYAD is no more.

It will be interesting to see in any future evaluation or surveys what impact the elimination of the AYAD stream has on the overall demographics of volunteers. That is, if these reports are made public—access to such reports has been an issue in the past.

( You can read our previous posts on the volunteer program here )

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Contributors.

Ashlee Betteridge was the Manager of the Development Policy Centre until April 2021. She was previously a Research Officer at the centre from 2013-2017. A former journalist, she holds a Master of Public Policy (Development Policy) from ANU and has development experience in Indonesia and Timor-Leste. She now has her own consultancy, Better Things Consulting, and works across several large projects with managing contractors.

I have to say I do not mourn the end of AYAD. Unlike AVI and other schemes, AYAD was conceived (by former FM Downer) and operated as a supply-driven scheme aimed at creating opportunities for well-meaning and experience-seeking young Australians. Providing actually skilled people to really assist receiving countries and organisations was a secondary goal at best.

Living and working in Asia and the Pacific in recent years, I saw lots of genuine and some very capable young people come out as AYADs. The AYADs almost always had a marvelous experience. But the skills and experience they provided to their “beneficiaries” was, sadly, often negligible. At times, they were in fact a burden on their resource-strapped “partners”.

Exposing young Australians to developing countries and issues is undoubtedly a great idea. But at a time when the aid budget is being slashed, funding working holidays for young Aussies is not an optimal spend of scarce development dollars.

As a former AVID who saw a lot of AYADs in country, I would have to say that I agree with shenqow. Ultimately, the best outcomes for beneficiary countries are going to come from people with considerable professional experience, rather than poorly trained volunteers. I’d like to see the program go even higher up the skills ladder, though this could be difficult.

AYAD was good for Australians, but was fairly poor for the rest of the world. We can do better.

This article conveys the same ideas in much harsher language.

While I have aired my thoughts on some of the issues with the volunteer program before on this blog, I also can’t pan AYADs universally because I have seen some really talented ones, and some people who have turned their AYAD experience into the base for a career where they are making substantive contributions. Hopefully the recruitment process will still capture such people, even when they are under 30.

I do see great benefits from young people engaging in the region–I was incredibly fortunate to land a job in Jakarta at the age of 23 and it was a life-shaping experience. I think a supported ‘internships’ type program could be valuable, where younger Australians have the opportunity to work for partners in developing countries that are adequately resourced to support and utilise them. Something like this might more adequately acknowledge that the intern is inexperienced and is reaping benefits from the experience, rather than the idea of a ‘volunteer’, which implies someone giving something up to help. Though perhaps these opportunities shouldn’t be funded out of ODA.

The New Colombo Plan looks set to offer the opportunity for internships, but at the moment it is explicitly tied to study (i.e. you have to be an undergraduate student to be eligible). It would be good to see wider opportunities for early career professionals to engage.

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Archive for the ‘ AYAD ’ Category

AYAD – Summary

AYAD – SUMMARY

• Australians aged 18-30
• Asia Pacific region
• 3-12 month assignments
• 400 placements a year
• Australian Government (AusAid) initiative – fully funded
• Launched 1998

Application:

• Specific Assignments page
• Choose up to 3 assignments – complete an application form for each assignment
• Similar to applying for jobs (includes Selection Criteria)

Destinations:

• Fully Funded – no out-of-pocket expenses for volunteers or host organisations
• Education, Environment, Gender, Governance, Health, Infrastructure, Rural Development and Trades
• Living Allowance provided
• In-Country Manager
• Met at the airport
• In-country orientation program
• Settle you in short-term accommodation
• Assistance to find accommodation, language training
• Assistance securing visas

Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development – Support

The AYAD Program provides a range of allowances to AYADs in order to support you while you are on assignment. These allowances are not a salary, instead they cover the cost of establishing yourself on assignment and living in-counrty.

• Establishment allowance
• Living and accommodation allowances
• Assignment support allowance
• Resettlement allowance

The Establishment Allowance is a once off payment at the start of your assignment of $600-$1200. The Establishment Allowance covers expenses associated with taking up the assignment including visa costs, excess baggage and costs associated with setting up accommodation in-country.

The cost of living varies greatly across (and in some cases within) the countries where AYAD operates. The AYAD allowances are structured to take these differences into account. Living and Accomodation Allowances are paid monthly into an Australian bank account.

3. Assignment Support Allowance

The Assignment Support Allowance is a once off payment of $350 with the opportunity to apply for further funding. The Assignment Support Allowance is to cover the costs of activities or materials that are needed to help support the assignment and achieve assignment outcomes including language training, purchase of books and equipment.

4. Resettlement Allowance

Next>>

IN COUNTRY SUPPORT

 AYAD Program provides support to AYADs and Host Organisations in the countries where we work. An In-country Manager (ICM) is based in every country where the AYAD Program places AYADs (except Kiribati which is covered by the Fiji ICM).

ICMs are AYAD Program staff members who live in that country, often in the capital city. Each country has its own ICM and the AYAD Program employs a combination of local and expatriate staff as ICMs.

When AYADs arrive in country the ICM will meet you at the airport, settle you in short term accomodation and run an In-country Orientation Program. The In-country Orientation Program includes information about the culture and history of the host country, banking, shopping, taking public transport, health and security issues. AYADs also meet with the in-country AusAID Post, visit the Australian Embassy/High Commission and, in some countries, meet AYADs from previous intakes.

The ICM also helps volunteers:

• find safe, affordable and appropriate accommodation
• source appropriate language training
• secure appropriate visas

Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development – Projects

You name it – the AYAD Program has probably sent an AYAD to do it! The range of AYAD jobs (or assignments as we call them) is diverse and includes everything from engineers to marketing coordinators, IT officers to mechanics.

AYAD assignments are needs based. That means that a host organisations in a partner country identifies a need within their organisation and works with us to develop an AYAD assignment. Each AYAD assignment corresponds to identified partner government  and Australian Government development priorities for each country.  

Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development – Fees

Here is the good news: the AYAD Program is a fully supported program. This means that volunteers do not pay to participate in the Program.

So what does fully supported mean?

Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development – Destinations

Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development – Application

Who can be an AYAD?

The baseline? To be eligible for the AYAD Program you must be 18-30 year old and an Australian citizen.  

As an AYAD you will need the specific skills, experience and personal attributes required to do the assignment for which you apply. Because AYAD assignments are diverse (ranging from project officers to mud crab aquaculturalists and everything in between) that means that each AYAD is unique. 

So how do you know if you would make a good AYAD? The first thing to think about is your motivation for becoming an AYAD. Do you have a pasion for development? Are you looking for international experience? Are you looking for ways to challenge and stretch yourself and, at the same time, give something back to communites in need?

If you answered yes to any of those questions than the AYAD Program could be for you. The Program is a fantastic opportunity to see what you’re capable of and get some of that much needed experience. It’s also an amazing way to live and work overseas and see how your skills and knowledge can help others address issues around poverty, health, education and governance.

Reality Check

 ____________________________

How to Apply

• Check out the assignments on our  Assignments page
• Choose up to 3 assignments
• Download the AYAD Application Form
• Complete a full application for each assignment
• Post in your application(s) to the AYAD Program:

Your application

• Application Cover Sheet
• Attachment 1: CV (use template provided)
• Attachment 2:  Statement against Selection Criteria
• Attachment 3:  Referee report and contact details
• Attachment 4: photocopy of your passport id page
• Attachment 5: 1 signed colour passport photo

* Please note that if you are applying for multiple assignments you may choose to use the same referee reports for all three applications and the same responses to Part B of the Statement against Selection Criteria for each application (but Part A must be specific to each assignment).

Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development – About

The Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development (AYAD) Program aims to strengthen mutual understanding between Australia and the countries of the Asia-Pacific region and make a positive contribution to development.

The Program achieves these aims by placing skilled young Australian (18-30) on short-term assignments in developing countries in the Asia Pacific region. AYAD volunteers work with local counterparts in Host Organisations to achieve sustainable development outcomes through capacity building, skills transfer and institutional strengthening.

Every year, the AYAD Program places 400 young Australians on short-term assignments (3-12 months) in developing countries across the Asia Pacific region. AYADs work with local counterparts in partner Host Organisations to achieve sustainable development outcomes through capacity building, skills transfer and institutional strengthening.

AYAD assignments cover a diverse range of sectors including Education, Environment, Gender, Governance, Health, Infrastructure, Rural Development and Trades.

The AYAD Program is an Australian Government, AusAID initiative and is fully funded by the Australian Government’s overseas aid agency, AusAID.

A Brief History

The AYAD Program was launched on the 28th of August 1998. The goal of the AYAD Program is to strengthen mutual understanding between Australia and the countries of the Asia Pacific region and make a positive contribution to development. The Program does this through four main objectives:

1.   To provide opportunities for young Australians to contribute to Australia’s overseas aid program and to gain personal and professional experience in developing countries.

2.   To build the capacity of individuals, organisations and communities in partner countries through sharing skills and knowledge.

3.   To foster linkages and partnerships between organisations and communities in Australia and those in developing countries.

4.   To raise public awareness of development issues and the Australian aid program in the Australian community.

The AYAD Program was piloted for two years until 2000 when, buoyed by the success and achievements of the Program in providing outstanding opportunities for young Australians and positive contributions to development in the Asia Pacific region, it was decided to continue and expand upon the AYAD Program as an integral part of the Australian Government’s overseas aid program.

The AYAD Program was put out to tender and Austraining International was the successful tenderer. Since that time Austraining International has successfully retendered for the AYAD Program (in 2006) and continues to manage the AYAD Program on behalf of AusAID.

The AYAD Program has worked in 21 different countries throughout its history and continues to respond to emerging needs and priorities of the Australian aid program and partner countries.

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Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development (AYAD) Program

By Careers & Employment Service 10 Feb 2006

The next intake assignments for the Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development (AYAD) are currently online. The AYAD Program sends young Australians aged 18-30 on short term assignments (3-12 months) through Asia & the Pacific. The Program provides support to cover the costs of volunteering overseas including pre-departure medicals, insurance, travel, in-country allowance, and the support of an in-country manager. Further information (including a detailed description of positions available) can be found on their website (see link below).

• Mon to Fri 9.00 am - 5.00pm
• Phone: +61 7 3735 5345
• Email [email protected]
• Nathan Campus: Building N12 (Sewell), Level 1
• Gold Coast Campus: G33 (Student Centre), Level 1

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AYAD Info Pack - AYADs

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Volunteer assignments Each year the <strong>AYAD</strong> Program places around 400 volunteers in volunteer assignments across Asia, the Pacific and Africa. The <strong>AYAD</strong> Program sources volunteer assignments from partner Host Organisations (HOs) in Asia, the Pacific and Africa. Host Organisations identify a need within their organisation and develop an assignment proposal which they submit to the <strong>AYAD</strong> Program. Potential candidates apply for specific assignments just like they would a job in Australia. See the Application and Selection sections of this information pack for more detail on these processes. The <strong>AYAD</strong> Program believes in responding to the needs of partner countries and ensures that no assignment replaces local staff. The <strong>AYAD</strong> Program also works in line with the Australian Government’s overseas aid program priorities when sourcing volunteer assignments. <strong>AYAD</strong> assignments have long term sustainable development goals. The <strong>AYAD</strong> Program does not send volunteers in response to emergencies. How to apply to assignments <strong>AYAD</strong> assignments are advertised monthly online on the 1 st of each month. Assignments are advertised on the <strong>AYAD</strong> website at www.ayad.com.au. Applications close strictly on the 21 st of each month at 5.30PM AEST. Assignments are applied to by completing an online application form. A link to the online application form is found in each assignment description. For further information on the application process and how to apply please read further down or refer to the How to Apply page on the <strong>AYAD</strong> website. Host Organisations The <strong>AYAD</strong> Program places volunteers with organisations in Asia, the Pacific and Africa. The <strong>AYAD</strong> Program calls these organisations ‘Host Organisations’ or ‘HOs’. Host Organisations (HOs) are government departments, non-government organisations (NGOs), educational institutions and private companies who host a volunteer for the duration of an assignment. Host Organisations are required to provide <strong>AYAD</strong>s with an appropriate workspace and any equipment required to fulfil their assignment outcomes. Any work related travel expenses will also be covered by the Host Organisation (including travel, accommodation and per diems). Host Organisations will designate a supervisor for the <strong>AYAD</strong> and counterpart(s) with whom the <strong>AYAD</strong> will work directly. Australian Partner Organisations The <strong>AYAD</strong> Program also works with Australian Partner Organisations (APOs) to develop and support <strong>AYAD</strong> assignments. Australian Partner Organisations are Australian government departments, non-government organisations, educational institutions and private companies that have or wish to establish links with organisations working in development in the Asia, the Pacific and Africa (Host Organisations). APOs work together with Host Organisations to develop <strong>AYAD</strong> assignment proposals, assist in sourcing potential volunteers (by nominating candidates) and provide mentoring, advice and support to <strong>AYAD</strong>s and HO staff throughout the assignment process. V2012-09-03

Host Organisations do not need to have an Australian Partner Organisation to submit an assignment to the <strong>AYAD</strong> Program. In some cases, APOs may also be the Host Organisation if they have offices based in the country of the volunteer assignment. Volunteer Support <strong>AYAD</strong> volunteers will receive the following support from the <strong>AYAD</strong> Program: • Australian Volunteers Briefing • Pre-departure medical examination and vaccinations • Comprehensive insurance (travel/medical/professional) • Travel to the host country and back to Australia • In-country support from the In Country Manager (ICM) • Post placement medical examination • Debrief on return from assignment • Visas Allowances • Living and Accommodation allowances • Settlement allowance • Resettlement allowance • Assignment support allowance <strong>AYAD</strong> allowances are structured to take into account the differing costs in each country and will allow volunteers to lead a moderately comfortable lifestyle while on assignment. Allowances are reviewed every 6 months by the <strong>AYAD</strong> Program. Please download the allowance rates document at www.ayad.com.au for the most up to date allowance rates. The <strong>AYAD</strong> Program also allows <strong>AYAD</strong>s to apply for ‘Assignment Support Funding’ of up to $1,000 per applicant. This funding is competitive and will be awarded to a limited number of applicants based on an assessment of the potential impact on the assignment’s development outcomes. <strong>AYAD</strong>s who receive this funding will be required to report on the use of these funds. Living Allowance The Living Allowance is based on the average cost of living for a volunteer in each country. The Living Allowance is calculated by taking into account the costs of a number of factors including food, daily travel to and from an assignment placement, communication and other incidental costs. The cost of living varies greatly across (and in some cases within) the countries where <strong>AYAD</strong> operates. The <strong>AYAD</strong> allowances are structured to take these differences into account. V2012-09-03

• Page 1: Introducing AYAD What is AYAD? The
• Page 5 and 6: Priority Sectors AYAD is guided by
• Page 7 and 8: Volunteer Selection Process Success
• Page 9: Security and Emergencies The AYAD P

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Fardowsa is Kyeema’s Workplace Giving Champion for Palladium Australia. Outside of work with Palladium, Fardowsa is a Youth Mentor for the African Youth Support Council. Fardowsa hopes to create social changes that positively impacts her community, both at political and community level.  

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The History of our Australian Aid Volunteers

Tahereh Parker, AVID program, Fiji, 2017

Jo Clapham, AVID program, Kiribati, 2016

Max Barot, AVID program, Vietnam, 2015

Eliza Smith, AYAD program, Kenya, 2013

Tarni Cooper, AYAD program, Kenya, 2013

Simon Fraval, AYAD program, Kenya, 2012

Our first volunteer.

Jarrah Young, AYAD program, Kenya, 2010   

Always remembered..

Jarrah Young was Kyeema’s first Australian Youth Ambassador for Development volunteer. In 2010, having developed an interest in research, she commenced a 12-month volunteer assignment at ILRI in Nairobi, Kenya. Here she made valuable contributions to a World Bank zoonotic disease project, an impact assessment on the World Bank Avian Influenza project in Nigeria and a study on disease interaction between wildlife and livestock in Kenya. And she also undertook a major study on understanding adoption of vaccines by small-holder farmers, using control of Newcastle disease in Kenya and Tanzania as case studies.

The impact and calibre of Jarrah’s work with the AYAD program was reflected in her being accepted for an additional twelve month contract at ILRI. She was looking forward to continuing her work and using the findings of the study to identify and implement appropriate strategies which could be used to improve vaccine adoption. Her depth of satisfaction with her career choice and the passion for her role as a veterinarian in a developing country, where she could really ‘make a difference’, was truly inspirational.

Jarrah tragically passed away on a tour bus accident whilst holidaying in Namibia in February 2012 before starting back at ILRI. She made a lasting, wonderful impression on all she met and worked with, and is sadly missed. She is remembered as a very talented, dedicated, focused and committed veterinarian. She was personable, positive and an excellent communicator. She was instrumental in the development of several future AYAD assignments.

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An American Writer for an Age of Division

A year after Donald Trump assumed office, Ayad Akhtar was at the American Academy in Rome, contemplating populism, the degradation of democracy, and ruinous civil strife. He had been mulling over the idea of a play about the brothers Gracchus, plebeian politicians in the century before Caesar whose defiance of the senatorial élite and championship of the poor led to an unhappy end. Akhtar wasn’t alone in consulting Roman history to gain perspective on the present. From his window, he could look out at the residence of the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, Callista Gingrich, whose husband, Newt, was studying Augustus, rumor had it, for pointers on how to counsel a President who fancied himself an emperor.

Akhtar, who is forty-nine, is an obsessive autodidact, with a mind like a grappling hook for any subject that attracts his interest. There are many. As a kid growing up in the Milwaukee suburbs, he studied the Quran with a rigor that flummoxed his secular Pakistani parents. As a theatre major at Brown, he taught himself French, attaining enough fluency in a year to direct his own translations of Genet and Bernard-Marie Koltès. When he was in his twenties, working in New York as an assistant to the director Andre Gregory, he spent his free time analyzing the prosody of Spenser’s “ The Faerie Queene ” and poring over Freud, which led to a years-long study of Jung, then Lacan, then Winnicott. Although he lost his faith in his teens, religion of all kinds continues to fascinate him. “He’s the only American I know who has read Meister Eckhart,” the German writer Daniel Kehlmann, a good friend of Akhtar’s, told me, referring to the medieval Christian theologian and mystic.

Success arrived late, but Akhtar has made up for lost time. His first novel, “American Dervish,” about the coming of age of an innocent Pakistani-American boy, was published in January, 2012, when he was forty-one, the same month that his first play, “ Disgraced ,” about the unravelling of a jaded Pakistani-American lawyer, premièred, in Chicago. After a buzzy run at Lincoln Center, where tickets were scalped for fifteen hundred dollars apiece, “Disgraced” won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, then moved to a sold-out run in London, and to the Lyceum Theatre, on Broadway.

In short order, Akhtar had three more plays première, including “The Invisible Hand,” a thriller about an American hostage in Pakistan who, to pay his ransom, teaches his fundamentalist captors how to manipulate financial markets, and “ Junk ,” another Broadway hit, which transformed the dry subject of high-yield bonds in the nineteen-eighties into unexpectedly riveting drama. “Ayad’s particular brilliance is that he makes systems kinetic,” Josh Stern, a producer who is working with Akhtar to develop a television show, told me. “He’s able to take this huge, complicated infrastructure and distill it down to visceral character drama in a way that is unique.” As arcane as his intellectual tastes can be, Akhtar is determined to appeal to a broad public. “Proust meets Jerry Springer” is how he described his work to me when I met him, earlier this summer.

In Rome, Akhtar devoted himself to the classics that lined the Academy’s library: Livy, Tacitus, Machiavelli. One afternoon, he opened Giacomo Leopardi’s “Canti,” from 1835, and read the book’s first poem, “To Italy”:

O my country, I can see the walls and arches and columns and the statues and lonely towers of our ancestors, but I don’t see the glory . . .

An idea hit. Why not write to his own country—to the whole spliced-together nation, as it seemed on the verge of splitting apart? Forget the Gracchus brothers. Throw off the veil of metaphor and speak directly.

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The result is Akhtar’s second novel, “ Homeland Elegies ,” published this month. The book opens with a letter addressed “To America”—an “overture,” Akhtar calls it. In a crescendo of grievance reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” the narrator, who shares Akhtar’s name, denounces the nation’s recent sins and failures, citing the decline of peers and family members who have been felled by debt, low pay, suicide, and overdose, “medicated for despair, anxiety, lack of affect, insomnia, sexual dysfunction; and the premature cancers brought on by the chemical shortcuts for everything from the food moving through our irritable bowels to the lotions applied to our sun-poisoned skins.” He rails against the country’s cult of greed, its prostitution of private life for public attention, its allegiance to devices that “filled us with the toxic flotsam of a culture no longer worthy of the name,” and swears, on the sacred memory of Walt Whitman , to give his own account of the riven nation.

I visited Akhtar in late June at the modest Greek Revival house in Kinderhook, New York, that he bought last year with his fiancée, Annika Boras, an actor and director. Ongoing renovations had left the façade, with its portico of Doric columns, looking as if it had survived a small cyclone, though the interior was intact and comfortable, furnished with Boras’s baby-grand piano and the largest wall-mounted television I had ever seen. The couple had decamped to the country in early March from their rental apartment on the Upper West Side. Since childhood, Akhtar has had vivid dreams that he interprets as premonitions. One came to him just before September 11th, and another this February, in which he tried to escape an evil fog that was smothering the world. When the first cases of the coronavirus were reported in the city, he and Boras left immediately.

Akhtar starts every morning by reading one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. When he’s writing, he likes to jot scenes and themes on index cards, which he tapes above his desk to arrange and reorder. Lately, he had been working around the clock to complete the pilot for his television series, but, concerned that early disclosure of its subject could prove disastrous, he had removed all evidence, leaving a single card on which he had written, in Latin, “ Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit .” “It means, ‘Bidden or not bidden, God is here,’ ” he said. “It was a quote that Jung had up in his tower in Bollingen. It felt appropriate to what I’d like to think—that the mystery is present whether or not I’m aware of it.”

Akhtar, who is bald and youthful, wore elegantly ripped jeans and round, blue-rimmed glasses; when he took them off, in moments of distraction or excitement, his eyes looked unguarded and dreamy. He is gentler in person than he is on the page, friendly and fluid, ardent in his search for the precise idea, the right phrase. He exudes a confidence that might border on showmanship were he not so intent on poking at his vulnerabilities. Sitting far apart, we ate ham sandwiches. “High-octane pretension,” he said, when I asked him about his decision to speak, in “Homeland Elegies,” to America writ large.

But that was customary self-deprecation, protective and perfunctory. Akhtar is serious about his work to a point that can delight collaborators, or drive them mad. He and Boras met when she was cast in an early reading of “Junk”; they decided not to work together again. “I get really nervous when I have a show going up,” he said.

Akhtar has developed a theory of audience reaction influenced by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s book “ Thinking, Fast and Slow ,” and its suggestion that the brain processes parcels of information two and a half minutes at a time. He adjusts a play’s rhythms accordingly, spending each preview in a different part of the theatre to listen for every missed gasp and laugh. Relentless in his perfectionism, he sees every new production of a work as a chance to finally get it right, and was still tinkering with “Disgraced” when it went to London, three weeks after the Pulitzer announcement. “I remember the Times saying it’s unusual for a writer to revise a play after winning a Pulitzer,” he said. “To which my private response was: I didn’t give it a Pulitzer!”

With “Homeland Elegies,” Akhtar was just as intent on capturing his reader’s attention. The novel wears its erudition boldly. Discourses on Islamic finance, medical-malpractice suits, and Robert Bork’s antitrust theory punctuate the narrative. Writers of the show-don’t-tell school might worry about didacticism undermining artistry, but Akhtar has a different philosophy. “Telling is amazing—some of my best experiences have been being told stuff,” he told me.

Akhtar modelled his book’s main sections on different Tolstoy novellas: “ The Kreutzer Sonata ,” for a sequence on sex and rage; and “Hadji Murad,” for the bravura middle section about a Muslim hedge-funder who deploys an ingenious financing scheme to avenge himself on American Islamophobia. A final passage dealing with the decline of Akhtar’s father is inspired by “ The Death of Ivan Ilych .” The prose, too, is stippled with the kind of Latinate vocabulary rarely seen outside a set of G.R.E. flash cards.

At the same time, Akhtar, aware of his competition in the attention economy, wanted the visceral effect of reading the novel to feel like scrolling through social media, fluid and addictive. “It’s essay,” he said. “It’s memoir. It’s fiction. It just had to be seamless, in the way that a platform like Instagram is seamless. And one of the pivotal dimensions of that content is the staging and curation of the self.”

“Homeland Elegies” seems, at first blush, to be autofiction, a form in which the “fiction” is generally considered secondary to the “auto.” But is the disgruntled, discontented Ayad Akhtar of “Homeland Elegies” the same Ayad Akhtar who was genially sitting across from me, thriving in his work, content with his personal life? (Boras, a graceful blond woman in clogs, whom Akhtar had affectionately described as an introvert, briefly slipped into the room during my visit, kissed Akhtar on the head, and left.) During this and other conversations, Akhtar gamely deflected my attempts to pry out what, exactly, was true in the novel and what wasn’t. “Why does it matter?” he would ask—although just when I had assumed that something in the book hadn’t taken place in life, he would mention offhandedly that it had. “Homeland Elegies” performs a kind of trompe-l’oeil striptease, enticing readers with the promise of personal disclosure without ever revealing whether or not they have glimpsed actual flesh. The effect can be salacious, even inflammatory. The novel, which turns on Akhtar’s sense of alienation as a Muslim man in the United States after September 11th, leans into provocation: we see the narrator fucking a white woman in an ecstasy fuelled by racial fetishism and hostility, and watch as he trades on his cultural capital to become, as he caustically puts it, “a neoliberal courtier, a subaltern aspirant to the ruling class.” Indhu Rubasingham, the artistic director of London’s Kiln Theatre, who became close to Akhtar after directing a production of “The Invisible Hand,” told me, “For a Muslim-American man, writing a novel where people aren’t going to know what is true and what is not is really audacious and brave.”

Akhtar considers that risk to be its own reward. “I have some anarchist instinct, some righteous impulse toward disorder,” he told me. People had been asking him why he didn’t just write a memoir. “And my response to that is because there was a particular quality that I wanted to get to, something about the audience and the decay of their relationship with reality, and the collapse of truth into entertainment.” He wanted to devise “a strategy that was going to make its peace with this, not as a critique but as a seduction.”

If there is something Trumpian in the idea of reeling in a reality-addled public through a craftily manipulated persona, the echo is intentional. The President looms over “Homeland Elegies.” He’s there, in spirit, in the novel’s bilious, bleak prelude, and is named in the first sentence of the book’s first chapter. But so is Akhtar’s immigrant father, a prominent Wisconsin cardiologist who, he writes—perhaps truthfully, perhaps not—treated Trump in the nineteen-eighties and voted for him in 2016. Akhtar’s personal and political struggles with his father are at the emotional core of “Homeland Elegies.” One of the novel’s theses is that Trump is the logical outcome of the country’s trajectory in the past half century, the period during which Akhtar’s parents put down their roots. These facts, Akhtar came to believe, were intertwined; to get at what had landed a demagogue in the White House, he had to take aim at himself.

Akhtar’s American story begins in Pakistan. His parents met as medical students in Lahore, and married just before Akhtar’s father, Masood, immigrated to the United States, in 1968, to pursue a medical residency. His wife, Khurshid, a radiologist, soon joined him. Akhtar was born on Staten Island in 1970. When he was four, the family moved to Wisconsin’s Waukesha County—a Republican stronghold, ninety-three per cent white, that was last carried by a Democrat in a Presidential election in 1964—so that Masood could open a cardiology clinic in neighboring Milwaukee.

The marriage was fraught. Masood, a pioneer in the treatment of arrhythmia with electrophysiology, was beloved by his patients and respected in his field. Gregarious and irrepressible, he was prone to astonishing gestures of generosity; once, he sold his Audi to the valet at a favorite restaurant for a dollar. To his family, though, he could be selfish and unreliable; he gambled, drank heavily, and made little attempt to hide his womanizing. Akhtar, as the elder child, became his mother’s confidant and crutch—“a variation of the classic Oedipal dilemma.” (He has a brother, seven years younger.) This troubled dynamic is on full display in “ American Dervish ,” a novel that he does not mind acknowledging as straightforwardly autobiographical. Masood was unfazed by the portrayal. “Some people say you make me look bad,” he told Akhtar. “Other people say I’m a hero.”

Cultural factors contributed to his parents’ friction, too. Akhtar’s father embraced life in the United States, whose freedoms and possibilities matched his outsized appetites. “He made and lost two fortunes,” Akhtar told me: millions in investments that went boom, then bust. But Khurshid remained critical of her adoptive home. In a crucial moment in “Disgraced,” the play’s protagonist admits that he felt a measure of pride on September 11th. In “Homeland Elegies,” Akhtar attributes the same sentiment to his mother. “Our blood is cheap,” she says, years before the attacks take place. “They deserve what they got, and what they’re going to get.” He took his parents’ opposing perspectives as the novel’s poles. “One is infantile, rampant, moneyed individualism, an outrageous vision of American exceptionalism,” he said. “And, on the other hand, post-colonial rage—an outrageous vision of an American critique.”

Akhtar’s parents were the first in their families to emigrate, and they spent long vacations visiting relatives in Pakistan, where Akhtar, the firstborn son of a firstborn son, was lovingly fussed over. While the men went off to hunt, he stayed inside drinking tea with the women, absorbing their Punjabi chat and gossip. “I was really into the domestic interior, family dramas,” he said. One aunt loved Shakespeare; another enthralled him with stories of the Prophet Muhammad. Embedding in this protected female space helped him make better sense of his mother. “Her pain was, in large part, the pain of being a woman in a culture that made it very hard to be a woman,” he said. “I saw all of her sisters go through this dilemma. Very smart, charismatic, resourceful women who were subordinated, and separated.”

Influenced, in part, by his religious relatives, he developed an interest in Islam that soon turned to devotion, an experience that he mined in “American Dervish,” whose protagonist yearns to become a hafiz , someone who knows the entire Quran by heart. Akhtar had to beg his openly dismissive father to take him to pray at Milwaukee’s mosque. “I have an abiding interest in things that the somewhat narrow middle of contemporary Western life—economized life, if you will—tends to ignore,” he said. “The sort of declivitous lows and ecstatic highs. I was very interested in religion because it seemed to be the only thing that spoke to that register of experience.”

The religious fervor soon burned off. “Early on, I recognized—I won’t put it generously—the abject stupidity of thinking that I must know something that other people don’t, and that I must be right because I was born into something,” Akhtar said. (These days, he and Boras practice meditation.) His quest for the sublime found a new outlet when he saw “The Empire Strikes Back”—the Dagobah swamp blew his mind—and, later, in high school, when a teacher introduced him to European modernist literature. He decided that he wanted to be a writer, and the conviction deepened when he studied with the Americanist Mary Cappello at the University of Rochester, where he matriculated before transferring to Brown for his sophomore year. (Cappello, who appears in the novel as a beloved professor named Mary Moroni, told me that she still sends Akhtar detailed critiques of his work.)

Akhtar found early success in a creative-writing class in Rochester, with a short story about a burial gone awry in Pakistan. Impressed, the professor offered to connect him with literary editors at various illustrious magazines. Akhtar was elated, then frozen by doubt. What if the story was a fluke? He fell into a crushing depression. It was years before he showed his fiction to anyone else.

In July, Akhtar spent the better part of a week at the sound director Robert Kessler’s studio in Katonah, recording the audiobook of “Homeland Elegies.” On the afternoon that I visited, he was preparing to read a chapter called “On Pottersville,” which begins with a charged conversation the narrator has with a Black libertarian friend who is explaining why he votes Republican. Kessler, who has shoulder-length white hair and an aspect of relaxed competence, adjusted his blue medical mask and settled himself at the soundboard as Akhtar shut himself into a booth in an adjacent room.

“Let me know when you’re rolling, dude,” Akhtar said. Kessler gave him the O.K., and Akhtar launched into an epigraph from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which opens the section: “Just remember this, Mr. Potter: that this rabble you’re talking about—they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?”

Breaking for breath, he said, “I know it sounded nothing like Jimmy Stewart.”

“That’s a good thing,” Kessler said.

Akhtar feels that his books find their truest form in his performance of them. He takes special pleasure in rendering his parents’ accents: his mother’s lightly wheedling tone; his father’s comical bombast. As he read, he shaped the air with his hands, marking rhythm. “ Fuck me,” he muttered as he stumbled on a word. “Robert was telling me that people swallow a lot of air when they’re doing this, so that’s why I’m burping a lot.”

“I keep telling him he doesn’t have to be so polite about it, to just let it out,” Kessler said.

Akhtar discovered acting at Rochester, and transferred to Brown to pursue it. The program was like a conservatory: he was in acting class two hours a day, four days a week, and otherwise translating, directing, producing, and performing. At the end of Akhtar’s senior year, Andre Gregory gave a talk on campus. “I basically accosted him,” Akhtar recalled. “I said, ‘I’m a big fan of your work, especially the spiritual dimension of what you’re doing. I know you’re good friends with Jerzy Grotowski,’ ” the avant-garde Polish director. Akhtar had become infatuated with Grotowski’s spiritual predecessor, George Gurdjieff, the early-twentieth-century Armenian mystic who encouraged his followers to awaken a higher consciousness through music and dance. “Gurdjieff is dead,” he told Gregory. “So I want to work with Grotowski.”

Two weeks later, Akhtar skipped graduation and flew to Grotowski’s institute in Tuscany. “His whole thing was about trying to find ways to gain access to a kind of animal state, what he would call an ‘organicity,’ ” Akhtar said. Grotowski led his acolytes through sixteen-hour days that began in the middle of the afternoon and went past dawn, exhausting them to the point of breakthrough, or breakdown. “He and maybe one other person in my life have set a certain bar of what’s possible, intellectually, creatively,” Akhtar told me. Still, there was something cultish about a cloistered environment devoted to a theatrical genius who had stopped making theatre. When the actors performed, they faced an empty chair.

Some people spent a decade or more at the institute. Akhtar lasted a year. He and his girlfriend, a Frenchwoman whom he had met while studying abroad, and later married, moved to New York, where they lived in a studio apartment on Second Avenue. He began working as Gregory’s assistant, helping to rehearse Gregory’s production of “Uncle Vanya” with Julianne Moore and Wallace Shawn in the spectacularly dilapidated old Amsterdam Theatre. Louis Malle turned the production into the movie “Vanya on Forty-second Street.” (You can catch a glimpse of Akhtar, still with hair.) He taught acting workshops and tried to start his own company, but his approach was at odds with commercially minded New York. “I did a translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘No Exit’ that I rehearsed with three actors for eight months,” he said. “We never did any performances, we just continued to rehearse.” Akhtar prided himself on his artistic purity: “If you’d told me back then that I would become a Broadway playwright, I would have said, ‘Put a bullet in me now.’ ”

“He was very much opposed to films,” the director Oren Moverman, Akhtar’s best friend from those years, told me. “We had a lot of fun conversations about why film is no good, where I was there to defend the love I have for the craft.”

A dream led Akhtar to reconsider his resistance to what he had previously rejected as a debased medium. He started watching movies at a clip of six a day; within three months, he had seen three hundred and fifty, working his way through Hollywood from the thirties on up before pivoting to Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, and Ingmar Bergman. (Though his marriage managed to survive this hermetic boot camp, the couple split up a few years later.) In the fall of 1997, Akhtar enrolled at the Columbia film school. In his first semester, he directed twelve shorts, one film a week, a breakneck pace. “I just needed to learn the language,” he said.

After graduating, he and two classmates wrote “The War Within,” a thriller about a radicalized Pakistani whose plot to attack New York puts him in conflict with a friend who has embraced life in the United States. The movie’s exploration of alienation and allegiance previews similar themes in “Homeland Elegies.” Akhtar starred as the terrorist.

In a pivotal scene in “Homeland Elegies,” Akhtar’s car breaks down in Pennsylvania. The state trooper who comes to his assistance is helpful and friendly, until he asks about Akhtar’s name. After 9/11, Akhtar tells us, he had started wearing a cross around his neck, to ward off suspicion; he tries to dodge the question, but once the trooper realizes that Akhtar is Muslim his attitude changes, and Akhtar’s subsequent humiliation jostles something loose. “I was going to stop pretending that I felt American,” he vows, deciding to change the focus of his writing accordingly. “Paradoxically, these were the works that would lead to me finally finding my way as a writer in my American homeland and to the success that would earn me enough money to settle my debts and start making the monthly ends meet.”

In his twenties, Akhtar spent years laboring on a thousand-page novel about a poet who worked the graveyard shift entering data at Goldman Sachs. “I was reading too much Fernando Pessoa,” he said. The realization that his oblique, high-modernist project had failed coincided with the discovery that he had a knack for writing things that people actually liked. After film school, he supported himself writing scripts such as “Trash Man,” featuring a mobster placed in witness protection in Kansas who recruits high-school football players to help him run a racket. The popular register felt right. As a teen-ager, he’d loved soap operas. “There was something about campy melodrama that felt real to me,” he told me. “The melodrama of a Punjabi household is much closer to that than it is to post-Jacobian naturalism.”

He decided to write a novel that would be quickly paced but thought-provoking, set in a world he knew intimately. Still, seven agents passed before he found one who would represent him; eventually, Judy Clain, at Little, Brown, bought the book for a seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar advance. “There are so many people who are white who I’ve known who’ve worked so hard, who have not gotten any breaks,” Akhtar said. “So to impute the difficulties I’ve had solely to race, I think, would probably be less than accurate, although that’s of course been part of it.”

If skeptical publishers had been concerned that “American Dervish” wouldn’t appeal to white readers, they were proved wrong. Critics responded warmly. When I went to Audible to listen to Akhtar’s performance of the book, I found hundreds of five-star reviews from listeners who, as one wrote, found the milieu it described to be “both completely foreign and painfully familiar.”

But making his community accessible to others was not Akhtar’s only goal. When he was growing up, he had been subjected to the double vision common among first-generation kids. “It was an awareness that there were two ways of seeing the world and they were both probably wrong,” he said. “But they were both right. American society was pretty homogeneous where I grew up. And wonderful. I mean, the kids were great. The parents were welcoming. We played baseball and had crushes on girls. There were some cultural issues navigating that, but I never felt myself to be coming from the outside. And then there was this very, very different world view within the Pakistani community in Milwaukee, which was that this society was illegitimate.”

To tell the truth about where he was from, Akhtar felt that he had to press on those fault lines. The Milwaukee Pakistanis whom Akhtar depicts in “American Dervish” are hardly model minorities. The plot deals with the lasting effects of the domestic and legal repression of women in the Muslim world, and builds to an ugly eruption of anti-Semitism.

“American Dervish” rapped on a door that Akhtar had long wanted to open; “Disgraced” tore its hinges off. The play’s protagonist, Amir, is a Pakistani-born American who has jumped through every hoop. He is married to a beautiful, accomplished white woman, lives in a luxurious apartment on the Upper East Side, and is on the partner track at his corporate-law firm. In the course of the play’s single, ninety-minute act, everything is stripped from him. Akhtar was thinking of “Othello” when he wrote “Disgraced,” but the play also owes a debt to the American literature of racial passing, in which characters who have managed to escape their origins fear that some unwelcome revelation will cast them out of the white world they have given everything to enter. In “Disgraced,” though, it is Amir who exposes himself:

I SAAC : Did you feel pride on September Eleventh? A MIR (With hesitation): If I’m honest, yes. E MILY : You don’t really mean that, Amir. A MIR : I was horrified by it, okay? Absolutely horrified. J ORY : Pride about what? About the towers coming down? About people getting killed? A MIR : That we were finally winning. J ORY : We ? A MIR : Yeah . . . I guess I forgot . . . which we I was.

Daniel Kehlmann told me, “What you want, as a playwright, is to have a climactic moment that resonates so much that people might forget everything else that happened in the play but they will remember that moment. Ayad achieved that in ‘Disgraced.’ ”

“Disgraced” is rife with such taboo drama. Amir criticizes the Prophet and ridicules the idea that the Quran was dictated by God—grave blasphemies in Islam. “If you were to do the play in Cairo or in Islamabad, they would burn the theatre down,” Akhtar said. Its reception among American Muslims has hardly been without controversy. Akhtar summarized the general attitude: “We were so excited that you won this big thing and everybody’s talking about your play and now we’ve come with our parents and our family and you’re attacking us.” At the climax of the play, Amir, distraught and enraged, beats his wife, an act that provocatively mimics Western stereotypes about Muslim men. With “the brown dude reinforcing and enacting the worst version of his culture,” one Pakistani-American critic wrote, “the brown people in the audience are—once again, for their sanity and safety—on the defense, forced to be educators.”

Akhtar finds that he himself is frequently on the defensive. When “Disgraced” was on Broadway, he attended a fund-raiser at the home of a wealthy patron of the arts. The only other nonwhite person in the room was a young Muslim caterer. “I read your play,” she told him, as she was clearing his table. “So you’re the kind of person who makes us look bad.”

“Then that’s juxtaposed against folks who will come up to me and say, ‘I understand what you’re doing, but why are you doing it in front of them ?’ ” Akhtar said. “It echoes all the same stuff that Philip Roth went through.” Akhtar considers his path to have been blazed by Jewish-American writers like Roth and Saul Bellow, who, in the face of parochial censure, made audacious art that refused to flatter their communities. As unhappy as certain Jews were with “Portnoy’s Complaint,” though, none of them had the power to issue a fatwa. (“The Satanic Verses” has been a touchstone for Akhtar since he read it in his teens.) Still, Akhtar thought it was important to have someone from within the Muslim community argue for approaching Islamic scripture as literature, as a source not of eternal truth but of myth and metaphor.

This move is at the heart of Akhtar’s play “ The Who & the What ” (2014), whose protagonist, Zarina, scandalizes her community by writing a novel that treats Muhammad as an ordinary person with sexual impulses and moral flaws. The play uses comedy as a salve in the way that “Disgraced” uses drama as a torch; audiences around the world loved it. (A production has run at Vienna’s Burgtheater for the past two years.) A friend of Akhtar’s went to a performance at Lincoln Center. “He called me and he said, ‘I can’t believe what you’re doing.’ I said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ He said, ‘Why are you humiliating us like that?’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘They were laughing at us.’ I said, ‘No, no, they were laughing with us!’ He’s, like, ‘No, I was in that audience. How dare you say those things about the Prophet?’ This is a secular Muslim, a neurosurgeon in Chicago.”

Akhtar is wary of what he sees as a limiting trend, in American theatre and literature, of writers making work that strives to promote, rather than to interrogate, their racial or ethnic identities. “The audience is increasingly responding to the politics of representation,” he said. “But I don’t think an artist should be in advertising, which is sometimes what I worry we are becoming—advocates for certain points of view, as opposed to thoughtful instigators. It can go all the way back to Horace. What’s the purpose of art, to delight or instruct?” Such committed iconoclasm can sometimes put Akhtar in strange positions. When the long-running Viennese production of “The Who & the What” opened, in 2018, it featured an all-white cast. He was initially disturbed, but the performance won him over; German audiences recognized their own families in the Pakistani characters onstage.

At the same time, there are plenty of sympathetic white audiences who miss the point. “Disgraced” depicts the myopia of the white ally in the character of Emily, Amir’s wife, a painter who works with Islamic imagery and takes it upon herself to defend Islam to her husband. Akhtar finds that many audience members are “Emilys,” too intent on proving that they get the message to listen to what he’s trying to say. “The question I hear more often than any other is: ‘Why is it called “Disgraced”?’ ” he told me. “And this, many times when I have ascended the stage mere minutes after the curtain has dropped, is itself just a few minutes removed from a monologue downstage center, in which a character, addressing the audience, almost, uses the word twice in a monologue that is clearly a capstone speech to the experience that they’ve just had.”

We were sitting in the covered back yard of a restaurant in Hudson, New York. It was raining hard. Akhtar was adamant, almost agitated. The speech he was referring to is given by Amir’s nephew, who begins the play as an assimilated American youth and ends it as a devout Muslim with an unsettling attraction to extremism. Akhtar went on, “But somehow they can’t hear that, because all they see is a young Muslim who’s angry. In a skullcap. That’s not my problem. I am trying to give rich, political language to a subject who is often denied that, on stages and elsewhere. But the concussive conclusion on the part of an often well-meaning audience that is concerned about Muslim representations onstage is that simply seeing that reference, and seeing those shorthand symbols, cancels him as a legitimate representation of a Muslim point of view, when he is absolutely that.”

Akhtar’s face cleared. He smiled. This was a performance he had given many times, usually to the person in the audience who had made the mistake of asking the question.

One person who loved “Disgraced” without qualification was Akhtar’s father. “Now I can die happy,” Masood told him, at the New York première. At the after-party, Masood posed as a journalist, excitedly interviewing guests about their reactions and reporting back to his son. (Akhtar’s celebratory evening was derailed when his father got drunk and wandered off into the city alone; he had to be retrieved the next morning from Central Park.) Akhtar’s mother, too, found a way to let her son know that he had her support. When he gave her a copy of “American Dervish,” it was with trepidation: would she feel that he had condoned his father’s behavior toward her? After she read it, she told him, “I was happy to see you understood everybody was doing their best.”

When you win the Pulitzer for drama, a lot of people will want to be your friend. They will take you to parties and then leave with the person they brought you there to impress. You will be asked to meetings with studio executives and hired to write television shows that never get made. You will be invited to give speeches and to sit on theatre boards; you may attend functions at the home of a billionaire like James Murdoch to ask millionaires to donate to organizations like PEN America, which you might eventually be called upon to head—as Akhtar was, earlier this month. But that all comes later, after the phone call that sends you shooting fifteen feet into the air. Winning the Pulitzer, Akhtar said, was “a pleasure as subtle and complete as any I’ve ever known.” He took the prize as encouragement to make the most ambitious work about the biggest subject he could imagine: money.

Back when Akhtar was in his twenties and broke, his parents made a deal with him. They would send him ten thousand dollars a year if he read the Wall Street Journal every day to learn how to invest it. The nineties bull market was beginning, and the whole city seemed money-crazed. Akhtar got hooked on his assignment. He started reading Barron’s and The Economist , too. He studied books about economic theory and pored over price-to-earnings ratios, looking for an edge.

Akhtar had grown up with his father’s idea of American culture: Coca-Cola, Lana Turner, the Kennedys, opportunity, abundance. But the more he learned about finance the more he came to believe that money was the root of the whole system. You can have what you can pay for: that was the social contract. And, more often than not, what you could pay for was debt. “Interest is a sin in Islam,” he told me. “So the fact that Western finance is entirely predicated on the concept of interest? Growing up Muslim gave me a different perspective on that, and a kind of fascination with it.”

“ The Invisible Hand ,” which Akhtar wrote before his Pulitzer, premièred in 2012. The play draws a connection between international capitalism and international Islamic terrorism, two systems that wreak havoc on much of the world for the gain of the few. The audience is invited to identify with Nick, an American investor who has fallen prey to Pakistani terrorists—but it is his captor Bashir, a young, working-class British jihadi, who ends up winning its affections. Kehlmann told me that “The Invisible Hand,” which is fast-paced and gripping, “is the funniest Marxist play I’ve ever read.”

The Pulitzer gave Akhtar the power to explore such ideas on a larger scale. “I liked having the pressure, having the stakes,” he said. He started to imagine a muscular, glossy production about finance that could hold up a mirror to a high-powered Broadway audience as Shakespeare had done by staging plays about royalty for Queen Elizabeth and King James at the Globe. “Junk,” which opened at Lincoln Center Theatre in October of 2017, deals with the nineteen-eighties corporate raiders who grew rich by hastening the decline of American industry and the working class, but it is not entirely unsympathetic to them. The play’s protagonist, Robert Merkin, who is based on the leveraged-buyout pioneer Michael Milken, is a Jew who outsmarts a snobbish Connecticut competitor to force his way in. “Junk” is loosely modelled on Shakespeare’s history plays, both in the scope of its theme—the shift in American economic and political power, as Akhtar puts it, between “those who make things and those who raise the money for those who make things”—and in its structure. There are thirty characters, including dealmaking kings, boardroom-adviser classes, and common folk, represented by the workers at the steel company that Merkin is ruthlessly dismantling.

Akhtar did pretty well as a self-taught investor, but he got out long ago. “There’s something deeply, deeply immoral about the way that the national infrastructure has become tethered to the underlying market-cap values of private organizations,” he told me. “It speaks to the despoiling of the nation.” He found himself broke again in his thirties; the sale of “American Dervish” bailed him out. There is vindication in having made his way through his writing. He bet on himself, and won.

Last year, when Akhtar had nearly finished writing “Homeland Elegies,” his brother called. Their father had fallen and hit his head. Akhtar flew to the Milwaukee I.C.U. Masood had suffered a subdural hematoma, partly related to his alcoholism. He died on the first day of Ramadan—as Akhtar’s mother had, from cancer, two years earlier.

“I loved my father so much,” Akhtar told me. “He was such an extraordinary, generous, brilliant man. There’s something about being in the world that I learned from him, about being able to stand in your own being. But, you know, he was such a tortured guy, too.” He hoped that “Homeland Elegies” dramatized their conflictual but close relationship—one filled with passionate disagreements and thorny mutual attempts at understanding—in a way that would have done Masood proud. “I had to always say to myself, ‘Would Dad understand?’ And I always, for whatever reason, came to the conclusion that, yes, he would. He would get that there are things bigger than himself, and things bigger than me.”

“Homeland Elegies” was written before Masood died, but somehow its version of his departure amplifies the real one, and feels no less true. The body of the novel is brought to a close there—but Akhtar isn’t quite done. In a coda, he replays the thunderous, vehement theme of his overture, this time in a defiantly major key.

“I always knew that at the end of the book there would have to be some affirmation of American identity, notwithstanding all of the critique,” Akhtar told me. It’s a threshold moment, looking at once back and forward. With the publication of “Homeland Elegies,” Akhtar feels that he may be finished treating subjects that have obsessed him from his earliest days. “It’s a lifetime’s kindling that finally found an igniting story,” he said. Time to set fire to something new. ♦

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