George Saunders (born December 2, 1958) is an American writer. He is best known for his short stories and his novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), which won the Booker Prize. Saunders's short stories have been published in several collections, including CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) and Tenth of December: Stories (2013).
A professor at Syracuse University, Saunders won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and second prize in the O. Henry Awards in 1997. His first story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2006, Saunders received a MacArthur Fellowship and won the World Fantasy Award for his short story "CommComm".
His story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2007. In 2013, he won the PEN/Malamud Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Tenth of December: Stories won The Story Prize for short-story collections and the inaugural (2014) Folio Prize.
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Early life and education
Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas. He grew up in Oak Forest, Illinois, near Chicago, attended St. Damian Catholic School and graduated from Oak Forest High School in Oak Forest, Illinois. He spent some of his early twenties working as a roofer in Chicago, a doorman in Beverly Hills, and a slaughterhouse knuckle-puller. In 1981, he received a B.S. in geophysical engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. Of his scientific background, Saunders has said, "any claim I might make to originality in my fiction is really just the result of this odd background: basically, just me working inefficiently, with flawed tools, in a mode I don't have sufficient background to really understand. Like if you put a welder to designing dresses."
In 1988, he was awarded an M.F.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University, where he worked with Tobias Wolff. At Syracuse, he met Paula Redick, a fellow writer, whom he married. Saunders recalled, "we [got] engaged in three weeks, a Syracuse Creative Writing Program record that, I believe, still stands".
Of his influences, Saunders has written:
I really love Russian writers, especially from the 19th and early 20th Century: Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Babel. I love the way they take on the big topics. I'm also inspired by a certain absurdist comic tradition that would include influences like Mark Twain, Daniil Kharms, Groucho Marx, Monty Python, Steve Martin, Jack Handey, etc. And then, on top of that, I love the strain of minimalist American fiction writing: Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff.
Career
From 1989 to 1996, Saunders worked as a technical writer and geophysical engineer for Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, New York. He also worked for a time with an oil exploration crew in Sumatra in the early 1980s.
Since 1997, Saunders has been on the faculty of Syracuse University, teaching creative writing in the school's MFA program in addition to writing fiction and nonfiction. In 2006, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship. He was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University and Hope College in 2010 and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series and Hope College's Visiting Writers Series. His nonfiction collection, The Braindead Megaphone, was published in 2007.
Saunders's fiction often focuses on the absurdity of consumerism, corporate culture, and the role of mass media. While multiple reviewers have noted his writing's satirical tone, his work also raises moral and philosophical questions. The tragicomic element in his writing has earned Saunders comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut, whose work has inspired him.
Ben Stiller bought the film rights to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline in the late 1990s; as of 2007, the project was in development by Stiller's company, Red Hour Productions. Saunders has also written a feature-length screenplay based on his short story "Sea Oak".
From 2006 to 2008, Saunders wrote a weekly column, "American Psyche", for The Guardian's weekend magazine.
Saunders considered himself an Objectivist in his twenties but now views the philosophy unfavorably, likening it to neoconservatism. He is a student of Nyingma Buddhism.
Awards and honors
Honors
In 2001, Saunders received a Lannan Literary Fellowship in Fiction from the Lannan Foundation.
In 2006, Saunders was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Also that year, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
In 2009, Saunders received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2013, Time magazine named Saunders one of its 100 most influential people. The author Mary Karr wrote for Time, "For more than a decade, George Saunders has been the best short-story writer in English". In 2014, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Awards
Saunders has won the National Magazine Award for Fiction four times: in 1994, for "The 400-Pound CEO" (published in Harper's); in 1996, for "Bounty" (also published in Harper's); in 2000, for "The Barber's Unhappiness" (published in The New Yorker); and in 2004, for "The Red Bow" (published in Esquire). Saunders won second prize in the 1997 O. Henry Awards for his short story "The Falls", initially published in the January 22, 1996, issue of The New Yorker.
In 2013, Saunders won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. His short-story collection Tenth of December was named one of the "10 Best Books of 2013" by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. In a January 2013 cover story, The New York Times Magazine called Tenth of December "the best book you'll read this year". One of the stories in the collection, "Home", was a 2011 Bram Stoker Award finalist.
In 2017, Saunders published his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize and was a New York Times bestseller.
On November 19, 2025, the National Book Foundation presented its 2025 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL) to Saunders at the 76th National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner.
Other honors
Lannan Foundation – Lannan Literary Fellowship, 2001
MacArthur Fellowship, 2006
Guggenheim Fellowship, 2006
American Academy of Arts and Letters, Academy Award, 2009
PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, 2013
The New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2013", Tenth of December: Stories
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Elected as Member, 2014
American Academy of Arts and Letters, Inducted as Member, 2018
The House of Culture (Stockholm) International Literary Prize, 2018
Selected works
Story collections
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) (short stories and a novella)
Pastoralia (2000) (short stories and a novella)
In Persuasion Nation (2006) (short stories)
Tenth of December: Stories (2013) (short stories)
Fox 8 (2018, long story (first publ. as an e-book 2013))
Liberation Day: Stories (2022) (short stories)
Novels
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005, novella)
Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)
Vigil (2026)
Nonfiction
— (2007). The Braindead Megaphone.
— (2021). A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.
Children's books
The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2000)
Essays and reporting
— (2006). A bee stung me, so I killed all the fish (notes from the Homeland 2003–2006). Riverhead Books.
— (Autumn 2009). "The View from the South Side, 1970". Granta (108): 120–122.
— (2014). "Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness".
— (July 11–18, 2016). "Trump days: up close with the candidate and his crowds". American Chronicles. The New Yorker. Vol. 92, no. 21. pp. 50–61.
Anthologies
Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer (2012)
Cappelens Forslags Conversational Lexicon Volume II, edited by Pil Cappelen Smith, published by Cappelens Forslag (2016) ISBN 978-82-999643-4-0
Interviews
"Choose Your Own Adventure: A Conversation With Jennifer Egan and George Saunders". New York Times Magazine, November 2015.
"A Conversation with George Saunders". Image Journal, 2016.
"George Saunders: The Art of Fiction No. 245". The Paris Review, issue 231 (Winter 2019).
"An Interview with George Saunders". Believer Magazine, January 2021.
"George Saunders on A Swim in a Pond in the Rain." Mayday, March 2021.