George Saunders

George Saunders (born December 2, 1958) 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 worked for a time with an oil exploration crew in Sumatra in the early 1980s.

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, 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:

From 1989 to 1996, Saunders worked as a technical writer and geophysical engineer for Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, New York.

Ben Stiller bought the film rights to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline in the late 1990s;, 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".

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.

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.

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).

His first story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award.

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.

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 nonfiction.

In 2001, Saunders received a Lannan Literary Fellowship in Fiction from the Lannan Foundation.

Also that year, he received a MacArthur Fellowship; his short-story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The Story Prize; and 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.

He also contributed a weekly column, "American Psyche", to The Guardian 's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.

In 2006, Saunders received a MacArthur Fellowship and won the World Fantasy Award for his short story "CommComm".

In 2006, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship.

In 2006, Saunders was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

His story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2007.

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.

Many reviewers mention his writing's satirical tone, but 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.

In 2009, Saunders received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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.

In 2013, he won the PEN/Malamud Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Saunders's Tenth of December: Stories won the 2013 Story Prize for short-story collections and the inaugural (2014) Folio Prize.

His novel Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury Publishing) won the 2017 Booker Prize.

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.

"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."