Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Lincoln in the Bardo | 2017 |
| Vigil | 2026 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil | 2005 |
| Fox 8 | 2013 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| CivilWarLand in Bad Decline | 1996 |
| Pastoralia | 2000 |
| In Persuasion Nation | 2006 |
| Tenth of December | 2013 |
| Liberation Day | 2022 |
Publication Order of Children’s Books
| The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip | 2000 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| The Braindead Megaphone | 2007 |
| Congratulations, by the Way | 2014 |
| A Swim in a Pond in the Rain | 2021 |
About George Saunders
George Saunders (born 2 December 1958) is an American writer best known for his short stories and for the novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” (2017), which won the Booker Prize. His story collections include “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (1996), “Pastoralia” (2000) and “Tenth of December” (2013).
Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, and grew up in Oak Forest, Illinois, near Chicago. He took a degree in geophysical engineering at the Colorado School of Mines in 1981 and worked for a time with an oil exploration crew in Sumatra. In 1988 he completed an MFA in creative writing at Syracuse University, where he studied with Tobias Wolff and met his wife, the writer Paula Redick. From 1989 to 1996 he was a technical writer and geophysical engineer for an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, New York, and since 1997 he has taught on the creative writing programme at Syracuse.
His first collection, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline”, was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. His fiction often deals with consumerism, corporate culture and the mass media, in a tragicomic manner that has brought comparisons with Kurt Vonnegut. He has won the National Magazine Award for fiction four times, and in 2006 he received both a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship and won the World Fantasy Award for the story “CommComm”. “Tenth of December” won the Story Prize and the inaugural Folio Prize (2014) and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Besides the collections he has written the novella “The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil” (2005), the children’s book “The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip” (2000) and the long story “Fox 8”, first issued as an e-book in 2013. His non-fiction includes the essay collection “The Braindead Megaphone” (2007) and “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” (2021), which is based on a course he teaches at Syracuse and pairs seven stories by four Russian authors with his own essays.
“Lincoln in the Bardo”, his first novel, was a New York Times bestseller as well as the Booker winner. A further collection, “Liberation Day”, followed in 2022. He received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2023 and the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in November 2025. His second novel, “Vigil”, published in January 2026, takes place at the bedside of a dying oil company chief executive.
Photo: Shawn Miller/Library of Congress, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).