A Plan to Save the World

First published in 2021, Iraqi writer Hassan Akram’s debut novel, A Plan to Save the World, gazes out through the eyes of a boy to explore the period following the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. A young and curious Hassan attempts to devise a plan to eliminate warfare from his homeland. Inspired by the eccentric Miran, who prefers the company of chickens over people, and messages transmitted to him by his dead uncle through a tape recorder, Hassan sets out from Basra on a quest: “I had to run in every direction, to explore this life myself.”

In A Plan to Save the World, an excerpt from which was included in Best Literary Translations 2025, childhood idealism clashes with the stark realities of living through war in Hassan’s mission to not only save the world, but himself.