George Saunders

George Saunders was born in 1958 in Amarillo, Texas, but he grew up in Chicago. When he was eighteen, he attended the Colorado School of Mines, where he graduated with a geophysical engineering degree in 1981. Upon graduation, he worked as a field geophysicist in the oil-fields of Sumatra, an island in Southeast Asia. Perhaps because the closest town was only accessible by helicopter, Saunders started reading voraciously while working in the oil-fields. A year and a half later, he got sick after swimming in a feces-contaminated river, so he returned to the United States. During this time, he worked a number of hourly jobs before attending Syracuse University, where he earned his Master’s in Creative Writing. While studying at Syracuse, he met Paula Redick, one of his peers in the writing program. Three weeks later, they were engaged to be married. Within three years of their marriage, the couple had two daughters, and Saunders took a job as a technical writer. At this point he began writing books, eventually publishing his first short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Known primarily as a master of short fiction, Saunders also writes travel and profile pieces for well-known outlets like The New Yorker and GQ. In 2017, his long-awaited debut novel was published and won him the Man Booker Prize. He has also won Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, as well as the PEN/Hemingway Award. He currently teaches at Syracuse University’s Creative Writing Program.