George Saunders

Born on December 2, 1958, in Amarillo, Texas, George Saunders grew up in Oak Forest, Illinois, on the edge of Chicago, where he went to a Catholic grade school and the local high school. He came to writing by an unlikely road: a degree in geophysical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines in 1981, time on an oil exploration crew in Sumatra, and spells as a roofer, a Beverly Hills doorman and a slaughterhouse worker. At Syracuse University, where he took an MFA in 1988 under Tobias Wolff, he met the writer Paula Redick and was engaged to her within three weeks. For the next seven years he worked as a technical writer and geophysical engineer for an environmental firm in Rochester, New York, writing fiction around the job, and the stories that became CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), set in failing theme parks and corporate purgatories, found a voice nobody else had: absurd, wounded, very funny and morally serious. He joined the Syracuse faculty in 1997 and has taught there since. Pastoralia (2000) and In Persuasion Nation (2006) followed, along with four National Magazine Awards and, in 2006, a MacArthur Fellowship. Tenth of December (2013) won The Story Prize and the first Folio Prize, and The New York Times Magazine called it "the best book you'll read this year". His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), built from the voices of the dead in a Georgetown cemetery on the night Abraham Lincoln visits the body of his son Willie, won the Booker Prize. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021) set out a master class in reading the stories of four Russian writers, and Liberation Day (2022) returned him to stories. A student of Nyingma Buddhism, he received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2025, and the novel Vigil followed in 2026.

On a visit to Washington, years before he wrote a novel, Saunders was shown a crypt on a hill where, his wife's cousin said, the grieving Lincoln had gone to hold the body of his son Willie. An image of the Lincoln Memorial fused with the Pieta came to him. He carried it, too scared to try, for twenty-odd years.