George Saunders

Saunders trained as a geophysical engineer at the Colorado School of Mines and worked on oil exploration crews in Sumatra before illness sent him home; he then cycled through jobs as a doorman, a roofer, and a convenience-store clerk while writing on the side. An MFA at Syracuse, where he still teaches, led to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, a story collection that established his voice in dystopian theme-park satire.

His stories, gathered across collections including Pastoralia and Tenth of December, use debased corporate and carceral settings to smuggle in unusual tenderness toward struggling, humiliated characters. A MacArthur Fellow, he built a large following through commencement addresses and essays on kindness alongside his fiction.

Lincoln in the Bardo, his first novel, arrived in 2017 after decades as a story writer and won the Booker Prize, assembled entirely from a chorus of historical and invented voices.