Wayne Karlin is the author of ten books, both novels and non-fiction. He has received two fellowships in fiction from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Paterson Prize in Fiction, and the Vietnam Veterans of America Excellence in the Arts Award. His novel Prisoners was named an Outstanding Novel in the 1998 Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook. Another novel, The Wished-for Country was also selected as an Outstanding Novel in the 2002 Yearbook, and Love After War was named one of the best books of the year (2005) by The San Francisco Chronicle. In addition to Wandering Souls (Nation Books, 2009), which National Book Award-winner Tim O’Brien called “an important, moving, utterly compelling, and wonderfully open-hearted book, one that will become a touchstone in America’s literature about the aftershocks of our terrible misadventure Vietnam," Karlin co-wrote and co-produced a radio program based on Wandering Souls which recounted his journeys with Homer Steedly and was aired on numerous NPR programs. He was also one of the script writers for the Vietnamese-Singaporean feature film Song of the Stork, which won the Best Feature Film title at the Milano Film Festival, and which was the first Asian film chosen in the Official Selection of the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily, Italy. It was also an Official Selection of the Reflection of Our Time category of the Montreal Film Festival, and has been shown in other festivals in Belgium won, Canada, the U.S. and Thailand.
Karlin's writing and publishing efforts have long-centered on reconciliation between former enemies. After his service in the United States Marine Corps in the Vietnam War, Karlin co-edited the first collection of Vietnam veterans’ fiction from the war, Free Fire Zone, in 1973, and in 1995 was the co-editor of the first collection of fiction by Vietnamese and American authors who had been on different sides in the war: The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers. He was the American editor of the Curbstone Press Voices From Vietnam series and has adapted and edited seven novels and short story collections by contemporary Vietnamese authors, as well as a second anthology Love After War: Contemporary Fiction from Viet Nam, for that series, and co-edited an anthology of American short fiction that was published in Vietnam. Recently, he edited and adapted a memoir by the major Vietnamese documentary film maker Tran Van Thuy, published in the Fall of 2016 by the University of Massachusetts Press. He has also developed the syllabus and directed a book discussion group for veterans under the auspices of the Maryland Humanities Council.