Phil Klay said: “I was raised with an appreciation for public service – my parents worked in the Peace Corps and international medical aid for years. But when I started college in 2001, America had just left one war and was about to enter another, and that seemed to be the best way to serve my country. Writing for me is the best way to make sense of the world, not just to take all your conflicted feelings and put them into a story, but to make them even more conflicted and complicated in the process of writing.”