Iraq War Novel Wins Hemingway/PEN Award

Author Kevin Powers. (Marjorie Cotera)

This Sunday, Kevin Powers’ debut novel “The Yellow Birds” will be awarded the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for fiction, a particularly fitting tribute, as this week also marks the tenth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War.

Kevin Powers is a veteran of that war, who drew upon his experiences to write his novel. “The Yellow Birds” centers around two young men who are deployed to Iraq in 2004, and the difficulties one of them faces after returning home.

As Powers tells Here & Now’s Robin Young, though the book is a work of fiction, he does see some of himself in the young men of his novel.

“I certainly do identify with the kinds of feelings that they’re having – the confusion, the fear, the guilt,” he said.

• Read an except of “The Yellow Birds” and hear the original interview

This segment originally aired September 19, 2012.

Guest:

• Kevin Powers, Iraq war veteran and author of “The Yellow Birds.”