Phil Klay

Phil Klay is a veteran of the US Marine Corps. His short story collection Redeployment won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics’ Circle John Leonard Prize for best debut work in any genre, and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times. His nonfiction work won the George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Journalism, Arts & Letters in the category of Cultural & Historical Criticism in 2018. His writing has appeared in various publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. In Missionaries (Penguin Press), Klay’s debut novel, a group of Colombian soldiers prepares to raid a drug lord’s safe house on the Venezuelan border. They’re watching him with an American-made drone, and about to strike using military tactics taught to them by U.S. soldiers who honed their skills in Iraq. In Missionaries, Klay examines the globalization of violence through the interlocking stories of a U.S. Army Special Forces medic, a foreign correspondent, a Colombian officer, and a lieutenant in a local militia. Conflict has defined their lives. Drawing on six years of research in America and Colombia, Klay offers a window not only into modern war, but into what happen to those lives after the drones are gone. In a starred review Kirkus praised how Klay “creates ambiguity […] through careful psychological portraits that reveal how readily relationships grow complicated and how even good intentions come undone in the face of humanity’s urge to violence […] An unflinching and engrossing exploration of violence’s agonizing persistence.”