During the summer of 2004, while a student at Dartmouth College, where he played rugby and boxed, Klay attended Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 2005 and then joined the U.S. Marines, where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He later explained that: During the U.S. troop surge in Iraq, he served for thirteen months in Anbar province in Iraq from January 2007 to February 2008. He left the military in 2009 and then earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Hunter College in 2011. He described his time in the military as "a very mild deployment" as a Public Affairs Officer. He said that he wrote his collection of short stories based on his service and return to civilian life because: He has objected to the way civilians distance themselves from military experience: He has described how "the gap between public mythology and lived experience" even affects both veteran-civilian dialogue and the veteran self-perception: The culture, according to Klay, presents hurdles to communication and a shared understanding:
Writing career
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: In the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dexter Filkins wrote that "Klay succeeds brilliantly, capturing on an intimate scale the ways in which the war in Iraq evoked a unique array of emotion, predicament and heartbreak.... Iraq comes across not merely as a theater of war but as a laboratory for the human condition in extremis. Redeployment is... the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls." 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. He had been thought "something of a longshot" to win. The New York Times included Redeployment on its list of the "Ten Best Books of 2014", and it received the National Book Critics Circle's 2014 John Leonard Award given for a best first book in any genre. In 2015, he received the James Webb Award for fiction dealing with Marines or Marine Corps life from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation for Redeployment. In June 2015, Redeployment received the W.Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction from the American Library Association. He has named Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin, as his "mentor". Klay 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 Granta. 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 and Fire and Forget. He has conducted several interviews with other writers and published them on The Rumpus. Princeton University named him a Hodder Fellow for the 2015-2016 academic year. In 2018, he headed the five-member jury that awarded the first Aspen Words Literary Prize. In July 2018, Klay was named 2018 winner of the George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Journalism, Arts & Letters in the category Cultural & Historical Criticism.
Personal life
He married Jessica Alvarez, an attorney, on February 15, 2014.
