The Yellow Birds

Background

Much of the novel draws upon Powers's experience serving a year as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq, from February 2004 to March 2005 after enlisting in the Army at the age of 17. After his honorable discharge, Powers enrolled in Virginia Commonwealth University, where he graduated in 2008 with a bachelor's degree in English. He holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry.[4][5]

Powers has said that the novel took him about four years to write.[5] He also comes from a military family as "his father and grandfathers both served, and his uncle was a Marine."[6]

With regard to the autobiographical elements of the novel, Powers says: "The core of what Bartle goes through, I empathised with it. I felt those things, and asked the same questions: is there anything about this that's redeeming; does asking in itself have value? The story is invented, but there's a definite alignment between his emotional and mental life and mine."[6]


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