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 child 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, and the world. 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, childhood idealism clashes with the stark realities of living through war in a boy’s mission to not only save the world, but himself.

Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer from Egypt currently pursuing his MFA at Boston University. He won a 2023 English PEN Presents award for his translation of Kuwaiti author Khalid Al Nasrallah’s The White Line of Night and an excerpt from A Plan to Save the World was included in Best Literary Translations 2025. 

Hassan Akram was born in 1993 in Basra, Iraq. He graduated from Qadissia University in Iraq and participated in the Nadwa creative writing workshop organized by the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) in 2019. His works include A Plan to Save the World and The Book of Nightmares.