Wayne Karlin

Wayne Karlin has published eight novels: A Wolf by the Ears (UMass Press)< Marble Mountain, The Wished-For Country, Prisoners, (all Curbstone Press), Lost Armies, The Extras, Us, (all Henry Holt), and Crossover (Harcourt Brace), and three works of creative non-fiction: Rumors and Stones, War Movies (Curbstone), and Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam (Nation Books). His books have been translated into Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Italian, and Vietnamese. A new novel, What Their Fathers Never Told Them, was a finalist for the PEN America Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. While he is perhaps best known for his books about the aftermath of the Vietnam War, he has also written a historical novel set in 17th Century Maryland, a spy novel centered in Eastern Europe and another novel set in the Middle East. His writing career began, after service as a Marine in the Vietnam War, when he became an editor and president of First Casualty Press, a cooperative publishing company set up by Vietnam veterans, and co-edited and contributed to the first anthology of veterans' fiction from the war: Free Fire Zone: Short Stories by Vietnam Veterans ,published by First Casualty and McGraw-Hill. From 1995 to 2010, as American editor for Curbstone's Voices from Vietnam series, he edited and adapted translations of writers from Vietnam, including (with Le Minh Khue and Truong Vu), The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers, which was listed as a Critics' Choice for 1995-1996, and (with Ho Anh Thai) Love After War: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam. Through the Voices series and other publishers, Karlin brought eight other novels and short story collections by Vietnamese writers, most recently Through Whose Eyes, a memoir by the film maker Tran Van Thuy. Karlin was one of the script writers and a consultant for the film Song of the Stork, a Vietnamese-Singaporean co-production which has won the Best Feature Film title at the Milano Film Festival, was the first Asian film chosen in the Official Selection of the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily, Italy and was in the Official Selection of the Reflection of Our Time category of the Montreal Film Festival. He was a consulting producer and writer for Shared Weight, the Center for Emerging Media's six part radio series on the aftermath of the Vietnam war which aired on over 40 National Public Radio stations. Karlin has received five State of Maryland Individual Artist Awards in Fiction, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paterson Prize in Fiction for 1999, the Vietnam Veterans of American Excellence in Arts Award in 2005, and the 2019 Juniper Prize in Fiction forl A Wolf by the Ears,