The OED has this to say about the etymology of awkward
< awk adj. + ‑ward suffix, i.e. ‘in an awk direction’; compare forward, backward.
Northward, southward, upward, downward, etc., are all familiar directions, but awk seems to take us somewhere different from any of those. perhaps into another dimension.
It seems to be a borrowing from Old Norse afug, 'turned the wrong way, back foremost', similar to the colloquial expression 'arse about face', and in Icelandic for example the related word öfugur means 'inside out'.
So awkward at first meant 'in a contrary direction' but has shifted semantically and now usually means clumsy or social inept, embarrassed ('An awkward silence fell'), uncooperative etc.; the original meaning is obsolete.
So where did afug come from? Etymonline suggests it is from a PIE root *apo-, 'from, away', surviving in Modern Greek with the sense 'from', e.g. Apo pou isse?, 'Where are you from?' (a useful conversational opener). It might also be the origin of Latin ab-, seen in words like abscond, absence, abstain, etc.
Awk once had derived words; awky, awkly and awkness, al sadly obsolete now, but easy enough to understand.