Lincoln in the Bardo (Saunders) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1958
• Where—Amarillo, Texas, USA
• Education—B.S., Colorado School of Mines; M.F.A., Syracuse University
• Awards—Man Booker Award; PEN/Malamud Award (more below)
• Currently—lives in Syracuse, New York


George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas and children's books. 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 (UK) until October 2008. In 2017, he won the Man Booker Prize for his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo.

Early life and education
Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas. He grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago, graduating 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.

In 1988, Saunders was awarded an M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University. While at Syracuse he met fellow writer and future wife Paula Redick: "we [got] engaged in three weeks, a Syracuse Creative Writing Program record that, I believe, still stands," he wrote.

Early career
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.

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.

Welders and dresses aside, those years also proved highly productive for Saunders in terms of fiction writing. In 1994 and 1996, he won the National Magazine Award for his short stories, "The 400-Pound CEO" and "Bounty," respectively. Both were published in Harper's. In 1996 he published his first short-story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, which became a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. That same year, another story, "The Falls," appeared in The New Yorker, and a year later won second prize in the 1997 O. Henry Awards.

It was in 1997 that Saunders joined the faculty of Syracuse University where he still teaches creative writing in the school's MFA program. He has continued to publish fiction and nonfiction.

From 2000 on
Saunders won his third National Magazine Award  in 2000 for his short story, "The Barber's Unhappiness,"published in The New Yorker. His his fourth NMA came in 2004 for the "The Red Bow," published in Esquire.

In 2006, he was awarded two highly regarded fellowships: a MacArthur Fellowship (with its prize of $500,000) and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His first nonfiction collection, The Braindead Megaphone came out in 2007. In 2009, Saunders received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 2013, Saunders won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and in 2014, he was elected to the Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Saunders gained national attention with his 2013 publication of Tenth of December, a collection of short stories. The book won the 2013 Story Prize for short-story collections and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Editors of the New York Times named it one of the "10 Best Books of 2013,"and the headline for a cover story in the paper's Magazine, called it "the best book you'll read this year."

Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders' long awaited first novel, came out in 2017 to wide acclaim.

Thematic concerns
Saunders's fiction often focuses on the absurdity of consumerism, corporate culture and the role of mass media. While many reviewers mention the satirical tone in Saunders's writing, his work also raises moral and philosophical questions. The tragicomic element in his writing has earned Saunders comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut, whose work inspired Saunders.

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 is now repulsed by the philosophy, comparing it to neoconservative thinking.  He is now a student of Nyingma Buddhism. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/8/2017.)