George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children’s books and novels. He is known for Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) and the collection Tenth of December (2013). He has received the Booker Prize and the Folio Prize.
George Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, and grew up in Oak Forest, Illinois. He attended St. Damian Catholic School and Oak Forest High School. In his early twenties, he worked as a roofer in Chicago, a doorman in Beverly Hills and a slaughterhouse knuckle-puller. In 1981, he gained a B.S. in geophysical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. He later said his “odd background” shaped the way he writes and compared it to “a welder designing dresses”.
In 1988, he got a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. There, he worked with Tobias Wolff. While he was at Syracuse, he met the writer Paula Redick, and they got married three weeks later. He said that the fast proposal was the fastest ever for the writing programme.
From 1989 to 1996, Saunders worked as a technical writer and geophysical engineer for Radian International in Rochester, New York. Earlier, he had spent time with an oil exploration crew in Sumatra. In 1997, he joined the faculty of Syracuse University to teach creative writing.
His first collection of stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. The next books were Pastoralia (2000) and In Persuasion Nation (2006). The Braindead Megaphone (2007) collected his nonfiction. In 2013, it was shortlisted for the National Book Award. Liberation Day (2022) is another collection of stories.
His novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) won the Booker Prize and became a bestseller. Other books include The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005), Fox 8 (2018) and Vigil (2026).
His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ and McSweeney’s. From 2006 to 2008 he wrote the American Psyche column for The Guardian’s weekend magazine.
Saunders has won the National Magazine Award for fiction four times: in 1994, 1996, 2000 and 2004. In 1997, he received second prize in the O. Henry Awards. In 2006, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and that same year won the World Fantasy Award for the story CommComm. He received the PEN/Malamud Award in 2013.
George Saunders has said he loves Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Babel and also draws on absurdist comic writers. He has noted the influence of Twain, Kharms, Groucho Marx and Monty Python, along with minimalist American fiction.
