菲尔·克莱

Phil Klay ( KLAY; born 1983) is an American writer. He won the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 for his first book-length publication, a collection of short stories, Redeployment. In 2014 the National Book Foundation named him a 5 under 35 honoree. His 2020 novel, Missionaries, was named as one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year as well as one of The Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Books of the Year.

Klay was a United States Marine Corps officer from 2005 to 2009. In addition to other projects, he currently teaches in the MFA writing program at Fairfield University.

As of 17 September 2026, Phil Klay was selected as president of PEN America.

Early life

Klay grew up in Westchester, New York, the son of Marie-Therese F. Klay and William D. Klay. His family background included several examples of public service. His maternal grandfather was a career diplomat and his father a Peace Corps volunteer; for years his mother worked in international medical assistance. He attended Regis High School in New York City, graduating in 2001.

Education and military career

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. Marine Corps, where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He later explained that:

I knew we were going to war, and I joined for the reasons that many people serve. My family always had a strong respect for public service. I wanted to be part of a cause greater than myself. I was thinking of it as a historic moment, and I wanted to put myself in a position of responsibility so I could hopefully affect things for the better.

During the U.S. troop surge in Iraq, Klay served for thirteen months 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. Klay said that he wrote his collection of short stories based on his service and return to civilian life because:

...what I really want — and I think what a lot of veterans want — is a sense of serious engagement with the wars, because it's important, because it matters, because lives are at stake, and it's something we did as a nation. That's something that deserves to be thought about very seriously and very honestly, without resorting to the sort of comforting stories that allow us to tie a bow on the experience and move on.

Klay has objected to the way civilians distance themselves from military experience:

[V]eterans need an audience that is both receptive and critical. Believing war is beyond words is an abrogation of responsibility — it lets civilians off the hook from trying to understand, and veterans off the hook from needing to explain. You don't honor someone by telling them, "I can never imagine what you've been through." Instead, listen to their story and try to imagine being in it, no matter how hard or uncomfortable that feels.... [I]n the age of an all-volunteer military, it is far too easy for Americans to send soldiers on deployment after deployment without making a serious effort to imagine what that means.

He has described how "the gap between public mythology and lived experience" even affects both veteran-civilian dialogue and the veteran self-perception:

[T]he mythologies are part of the experience of war. Often, we use them to try to make sense of what we've been through. We signed up with all those stories in our heads, after all, and then we came home to all the stories about war our culture was telling itself. Trying to have a conversation with someone (or even an honest conversation with yourself) about your war experience is an exercise in navigating through all the cultural garbage that's out there.

The culture, according to Klay, presents hurdles to communication and a shared understanding:

One of the very strange things about coming home from the modern wars is you're coming home to a country where such a small percentage of the population is serving. You get a positive reception when people find out that you're a veteran, for the most part, but mostly what people feel very keenly is a kind of apathy: a disconnect from the fact that we're a nation at war. You come home and find out that the American people aren't really paying attention and that is profoundly strange. The ability to bridge that gap is important. Veterans don't want to feel isolated, and in order to do that you need to find some way of getting your memories and relationships to those memories across to someone whose notions of what you've been doing are very vague and defined frequently by a variety of clichés.

Writing and teaching career

After Klay left active military service, he enrolled in Hunter College’s Creative Writing program, which was then under the directorship of his former professor, poet Tom Sleigh, whom Klay knew from the English department at Dartmouth. While completing his MFA at Hunter, Klay established important and vital artistic relationships with not only Sleigh, but also Peter Carey, Colum McCann, Claire Messud, Patrick McGrath, and Nathan Englander.

When he was named a Hertog Fellow at Hunter, Klay was able to sharpen his research skills assisting novelist Richard Ford with his novel Canada (2012). Ford personally thanked Klay on the “Acknowledgments” page of the latter novel, writing: “My thanks, too, to Philip Klay, who volunteered precious time to help me research this book.” All would be invaluable to Klay’s writing career, leading to his debut collection of short stories, Redeployment, published in March 2014.