Phil Klay is a graduate of Dartmouth College and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He served in Iraq’s Anbar Province from January 2007 to February 2008 as a Public Affairs Officer. After being discharged he went to Hunter College and received an MFA. His story “Redeployment” was originally published in Granta and is included in Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Granta, Tin House, and elsewhere.
In 2014 Klay’s short story collection Redeployment won the National Book Award for Fiction. He was also shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize and named a National Book Foundation ’5…
Under 35′ honoree. In 2015 he received the Marine Corps Heritage Foundations James Webb award for fiction dealing with U.S. Marines or Marine Corps life and the National Book Critics’ Circle John Leonard Award for best debut work in any genre.
Klay's collection of short stories, Redeployment, was published in March 2014. Writing in the Daily Beast, Brian Castner described the book "a clinic in the profanities of war". He wrote
If there is a flaw to be found here it is only one of narrowness; all of these narrators are American men and most are Marines. But the voices are strong and varied, and we hear from enlisted men and officers, chaplains and lawyers, State Department do-gooders and college students, and, of course, many grunts. The book contains plenty of blood-dead-hajji-fuck-kill-love, but also stories that violate innocence and faith itself. If obscenity scrapes just the skin then through the narrative arc of tragedy and suffering Klay has managed to dig down to the organs.
In November 2014, Klay won the National Book Award for fiction for his collection of short stories Redeployment. The judges described it as a "brutal, piercing sometimes darkly funny collection" that "stakes Klay's claim for consideration as the quintessential storyteller of America’s Iraq conflict."In his acceptance speech, he said: "I can't think of a more important conversation to be having — war's too strange to be processed alone. I want to thank everyone who picked up the book, who read it and decided to join the conversation." He was the first author to win the prize for his first book-length work of fiction since Julia Glass in 2002.[13] He had been thought "something of a longshot" to win.[14] The New York Times included Redeployment on its list of the "Ten Best Books of 2014",[15] and it received the National Book Critics Circle's 2014 John Leonard Award given for a best first book in any genre.
He has described Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin, as his "mentor".He describes himself as a Catholic and "a fan of a lot of ... the great Catholic literature–Flannery O'Connor, Francois Mauriac, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh." He has said that "religion and the tradition of Catholic thought ... helps you ask the right kinds of questions about these issues... There's a type of religious sentiment that is very certain of the answers and very certain about what should be proselytized. And then there's another type of religious tradition which is really much more about ... doubt and working your way towards more and more difficult questions. And I think that's the tradition that appeals to me."
He is a contributor to Grant] He has also reviewed fiction for the New York Times,the Washington Post, and Newsweek. His stories have appeared in collections as well, including The Best American Non-Required Reading 2012
