Matt Gallagher (author)
Matt Gallagher (born February 24, 1983) is an American author and former Army officer known for his war writing, both fiction and non-fiction. He first gained attention with Kaboom: A Soldier’s War Journal (2010), a memoir drawn from his time as a scout platoon leader in Iraq. While in the Army, he ran the front-line blog Kaboom under the pseudonym LT G; the blog was shut down by military authorities after he posted about turning down a promotion to stay with his soldiers. He left the Army in 2009 and later published Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War.
Gallagher grew up in Reno, Nevada, the son of Deborah and Dennis Gallagher, with a brother named Luke. He attended Bishop Manogue High School, where he edited the school paper and ran cross country. He earned a BA from Wake Forest University in 2005, where he joined Army ROTC, and later completed an MFA in fiction at Columbia University in 2013. He also co-edited Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (2013), a collection of veteran-written fiction.
His novel Youngblood (2016) received strong reviews from major outlets and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction. His second novel, Empire City, drew mixed reactions, with praise for its ambitious alternate history but some criticisms of its execution. In 2022, Gallagher volunteered in Ukraine and later reported on the war as a journalist for Esquire; his work from Ukraine was widely covered and he appeared with Anderson Cooper on CNN. He returned to Ukraine in late 2022 and again in 2023. His 2024 novel Daybreak is inspired by his Ukraine experiences, with Publishers Weekly calling it a harrowing front-line-style account.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 02:25 (CET).