George Saunders

George Saunders (born December 2, 1958, Amarillo, Texas, U.S.) is an American writer best known for his debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), which won the Booker Prize.

Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, and grew up in Chicago. He received a B.S. from the Colorado School of Mines in 1981 and an M.F.A. from Syracuse University in 1988. He met his future wife, Paula Redick, at Syracuse, where they were both enrolled in the university’s creative writing program; they were engaged three weeks later and married in 1987. They have two children.

Saunders was employed at an engineering company when he wrote his first book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, a collection of dystopian stories that was published in 1996. More short-story collections followed: Pastoralia (2000), In Persuasion Nation (2006), and Tenth of December (2013). He also wrote the children’s book The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, illustrated by Lane Smith, which was published in 2000. His novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil was released in 2005. The Braindead Megaphone (2007) is a book of essays. The environmentalist fable Fox 8 was first published in 2013 and then republished as an illustrated book in 2018. Congratulations, by the Way (2014) is a speech that Saunders gave at a Syracuse University commencement ceremony in 2013. During these years, Saunders also received a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (both 2006) as well as the PEN/Malamud Award (2013).

Saunders’s first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, takes the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son William Wallace (“Willie”) and Lincoln’s grief as its subject. Complex in form and ambitious in scope, it imagines the grieving president interacting with a chorus of spirits during his frequent visits to the Georgetown crypt where Willie was buried. The book became a bestseller and was awarded the Booker Prize as the best novel in English in 2017.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021) is a series of essays by Saunders on 19th-century Russian writers derived from his experience teaching a course at Syracuse University, where he became a professor in 1997. Saunders’s Liberation Day (2022) is a collection of short stories.