George Saunders
American ยท b. 1958
American short-story writer and essayist best known for darkly comic, deeply humane fiction collected in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and Tenth of December. He won the 2017 Booker Prize for his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. A long-time teacher in the Syracuse MFA program, Saunders distilled his classroom approach into A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, a generous reader's companion to seven nineteenth-century Russian short stories.