George Saunders


George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardian between 2006 and 2008.
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. In 2006 he 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. Saunders's won the 2013 Story Prize for short-story collections and the inaugural Folio Prize. His novel Lincoln in the Bardo won the 2017 Man Booker Prize.

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. 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.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University; while there, he met Paula Redick, a fellow writer, who would become his wife. Saunders recalled, "we engaged in three weeks, a Syracuse Creative Writing Program record that, I believe, still stands."
Regarding his influences, Saunders has written:

Career

Background and work

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.
Since 1997, Saunders has been on the faculty of Syracuse University, teaching creative writing in the school's MFA program while continuing to publish fiction and non-fiction. 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 non-fiction 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 many reviewers mention 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.
The film rights to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline were purchased by Ben Stiller 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 story "Sea Oak".
In a November 2015 conversation with American writer Jennifer Egan for the New York Times, Saunders said that he was writing a novel set in the 19th century, which while "ostensibly historical" was also closer to science fiction than much of his previous work.
Saunders considered himself an Objectivist in his twenties but now views it unfavorably, likening it to neoconservatism. He is now a student of Nyingma Buddhism.

Awards

Saunders has won the National Magazine Award for Fiction four times: in 1994, for "The 400-Pound CEO" ; in 1996, for "Bounty" ; in 2000, for "The Barber's Unhappiness" ; and in 2004, for "The Red Bow". 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.
His first short-story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award.
In 2001, Saunders received a Lannan Literary Fellowship in Fiction from the Lannan Foundation. In 2006, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. That same year, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
In 2009, Saunders received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2014, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 2006, he won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story for his short story "CommComm", first published in the August 1, 2005 issue of The New Yorker.
His short-story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2006.
In 2013, Saunders won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
His short-story collection won the 2013 Story Prize. The collection also won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2014, "the first major English-language book prize open to writers from around the world."
The collection was also a finalist for the National Book Award, and 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 from the collection, "Home", was a 2011 Bram Stoker Award finalist.

Awards and honors

Awards won

;Collections
;Stories
TitleYearFirst publishedReprinted/collectedNotes
I can speak!TM1999
  • In Persuasion Nation
Often acclaimed as among his best short stories.
The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip2000Children's Book
Four Institutional Monologues2000McSweeney's4th story included in In Persuasion Nationoriginally released as a booklet
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil2005Novella
Fox 82013, 2018Fox 8 First released as an e-book in 2013, the story was later published in hardcover by Random House in November 2018.
A Two-Minute Note to the Future 2014Chipotle bags
Mother's Day2016New YorkerUncollected
Elliott Spencer2019New YorkerUncollected
Love Letter2020New YorkerUncollected

Essays and reporting

  • The Braindead Megaphone
  • Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness

  • Anthologies

  • Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer