George Saunders

George Saunders is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist widely regarded as the most gifted and distinctive American short fiction writer of his generation. Born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1958, he studied geotechnical engineering at the Colorado School of Mines and worked as a geophysical engineer before receiving an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, where he later became a professor of creative writing. Saunders is best known for his short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), Pastoralia (2000), In Persuasion Nation (2006), and Tenth of December (2013), which won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Folio Prize. His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), won the Booker Prize—the first American to win the prize with a debut novel—and is widely considered one of the great American novels of the twenty-first century. Saunders received the National Book Foundation's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2025. He is also the author of the essay collections The Braindead Megaphone (2007) and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021), a guide to the Russian short story. He taught at Syracuse University for many years and is one of the most beloved and respected figures in American literary culture.