George Saunders

George Saunders was born in 1958 in Amarillo, Texas, and grew up in Chicago. He studied geophysical engineering at the Colorado School of Mines and attended the creative writing master's program (MA) at Syracuse University. Between 1989 and 1997, he worked as a geophysical engineer at Radian International, based in New York, and participated in oil exploration in Sumatra. With his early fiction appearances, he won the National Magazine Award for Fiction four times with his short stories "The 400-Pound CEO" (1994, Harper's Magazine), "Bounty" (1996, Harper's Magazine), "The Barber's Unhappiness" (The New Yorker, 2000), and "The Red Bow" (Esquire, 2004). His first book, the short story collection "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" (1996), was nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award. This was followed by seven fiction books and three essay collections, including the short story collections "Pastoralia" (2000), "In Persuasion Nation" (2006), "Tenth of December" (2013, Folio Prize winner and National Book Award finalist, Greek edition "Δεκάτη Δεκεμβρίου", Ikaros 2015), the children's fantasy novellas "The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip" (2000) and "The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil" (2005), which was likened to Orwell's "Animal Farm," and the novel "Lincoln in the Bardo" (2017), which won the Man Booker Prize (Greek edition "Λίνκολν και λήθη", translated by G.-I. Babassakis, Ikaros 2017). He has been a fellow of the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters (and a member since 2014), and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2006, he was honored with the MacArthur Fellowship. In 2013, he received the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.