From the archives: George Saunders (2013)

George Saunders, major contemporary short story writer, winner of a 2006 MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and a four-time winner of the National Magazine Award for fiction, visited the NYS Writers Institute on February 20, 2013, for a pair of events.

Saunders discussed his newly-published Tenth of December: Stories (2013), which presents an assortment of characters faced with painful moral quandaries and existential dilemmas. The protagonists include, among others, a shy boy who witnesses an attempted abduction; a combat veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; a terminal cancer patient who prepares to commit suicide; and a man deranged by a series of pharmaceutical experiments.

In between events, Saunders sat down with William Kennedy for a conversation on writers, influences, and the particular magic that happens when words are set loose on the page.

"I read In Our Time [Ernest Hemingway's first collection of short stories, published in 1925] when I was in college and just fell in love with it. The prose. The cleanness. And that little Hemingway-esque thing where suddenly you get a smell because of something he said. Or you feel a gust of wind," said Saunders.

Most recently, Saunders published a short story titled "The Moron Factory" in the March 2025 issue of The Atlantic.

In 2017, Saunders published his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English, and was a finalist for the Golden Man Booker, in which one Booker winner was selected to represent each decade, from the fifty years since the Prize’s inception. The audiobook for Lincoln in the Bardo, which featured a cast of 166 actors, was the 2018 Audie Award for best audiobook. ­

Born in Amarillo, Texas and raised in Oak Forest, Illinois. He has a degree in Geophysics from the Colorado School of Mines and has worked as a geophysical prospector in Indonesia, a roofer in Chicago, a doorman in Beverly Hills, and a technical writer in Rochester, New York. He has taught, since 1997, in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.

Here is an excerpt from his 2013 visit: