George Saunders

(born in 1958) – one of the most prominent American writers, author of short stories, novels, essays and children's books. He was born in Texas, and for two decades he has been teaching creative writing at Syracuse University. Before writing his first novel, he focused on short texts. His first collection of short stories – CivilWarLand in Bad Decline – was nominated for a PEN/Hemingway Award in 1996. In 2006, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and won a World Fantasy Award for his short story CommComm. In 2013, he has received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. His Tenth of December (2014) is particularly notable for its remarkable variety of language and apt satirical observations of reality. It took him until 2017 to write Lincoln in the Bardo, his first novel, which brought him the Man Booker Prize. The writer's most recent book is A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a fascinating and inspiring study of seven short stories by four Russian writers, in which he shares the knowledge he passes on to his students with the readers and lets them take a peek into the minds of Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy and Turgenev.