Karl Marlantes

Karl Marlantes is a veteran and bestselling and prize-winning author. He served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten Air Medals. Later in life, he served as managing director of a multinational corporation based in Singapore and then started his own consultancy practice in the international energy business sector.

In the late 1990s, Marlantes asked the Veterans Administration for help with symptoms caused by post-traumatic stress disorder. He entered counseling, and a decade later finished his first book, "Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War," the novel he’d been working on since returning from Vietnam. The book draws from his own war experiences, and he credits the process of writing it with helping him come to terms with what he saw.

Marlantes published his second book, "What It Is Like to Go to War," in 2011. The book weaves his personal recollections of Vietnam with analysis of the effects of war on those who fight, and how we can better prepare soldiers for the experience of war.

Marlantes’s third novel, "Deep River," a family epic set in the logging camps of Southwest Washington at the turn of the twentieth century, won the Washington State Book Award in 2020. It has been translated into several languages and was featured in the 2022 Festival America in Paris, France, under the title "Faire bientôt éclater la terre." His latest novel, "Cold Victory," set in Helsinki, Finland, in 1947 amidst the tensions of the developing cold war, will be published on January 9, 2024.

Marlantes is featured in Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's 10-part documentary series, "The Vietnam War." In 2018, Marlantes was featured in "Going to War," a documentary about what it means to train for, serve in, and return from war.

Marlantes graduated from Yale University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, before serving as a Marine in Vietnam.