Early life and education

Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas. He grew up with his sister, Nancy, in the south suburbs of Chicago, graduating from Oak Forest High School in Oak Forest, Illinois. In 1981 Saunders received a B.S. in geophysical engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. Of his scientific background, Saunders has said, "...any claim I might make to originality in my fiction is really just the result of this odd background: basically, just me working inefficiently, with flawed tools, in a mode I don't have sufficient background to really understand. Like if you put a welder to designing dresses." In 1988, he was awarded an M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University. While at Syracuse he met fellow writer and future wife Paula Redick; "we engaged in three weeks, a Syracuse Creative Writing Program record that, I believe, still stands," Saunders has written.

Career

Background and work

From 1989 to 1996, Saunders worked as a technical writer and geophysical engineer for Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, New York. He also worked for a time with an oil exploration crew in Sumatra. Since 1997, Saunders has been on the faculty of Syracuse University, teaching creative writing in the school's MFA program while continuing to publish fiction and nonfiction. In 2006, Saunders was awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship. In the same year he was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University and Hope College in 2010 and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series and Hope College's Visiting Writers Series. His nonfiction collection, The Braindead Megaphone, was published in 2007.

Saunders's fiction often focuses on the absurdity of consumerism, corporate culture and the role of mass media. While many reviewers mention the satirical tone in Saunders's writing, his work also raises moral and philosophical questions. The tragicomic element in his writing has earned Saunders comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut, whose work inspired Saunders.

The film rights to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline were purchased by Ben Stiller in the late 1990s, and as of 2007, the project was in development by Stiller's company, Red Hour Productions. Saunders has also written a feature-length screenplay based on his story "Sea Oak".

In a November 2015 conversation with American writer Jennifer Egan for the New York Times, Saunders said that he was writing a novel set in the 19th century, which while "ostensibly historical" was also closer to science fiction than much of his previous work.

Saunders considered himself an Objectivist in his twenties but is now repulsed by the philosophy, comparing it to neoconservative thinking. He is now a student of Nyingma Buddhism.

Awards

Saunders won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994 (for his short story "The 400-Pound CEO", published in Harper's Magazine), 1996 (for his short story "Bounty", published in Harper's Magazine), 2000 (for his short story "The Barber's Unhappiness", published in The New Yorker), and 2004 (for his short story "The Red Bow", published in Esquire).

Saunders won second prize in the 1997 O. Henry Awards for his short story "The Falls", initially published in the January 22, 1996 issue of The New Yorker.

Saunders's first short-story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award.

In 2001, Saunders received an Lannan Literary Fellowship in Fiction from the Lannan Foundation. In 2006, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. Also in 2006, Saunders received a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2009, Saunders received an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2014, Saunders was elected to the Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2006, he won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story for his short story "CommComm", which was initially published in the August 1, 2005 issue of The New Yorker.

His short-story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2006.

In 2013, Saunders won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

His short-story collection Tenth of December won the 2013 Story Prize for short-story collections. The collection also won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2014, the "first major English language book prize open to writers from around the world." The collection was also a finalist for the National Book Award and was named one of the "10 Best Books of 2013" by the editors of the New York Times Book Review. In a January 2013 cover story The New York Times Magazine called Tenth of December "the best book you'll read this year." One of the stories from the collection, "Home," was also a 2011 Bram Stoker Award finalist.

Works

Fiction

• CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) (short stories and a novella)
• Pastoralia (2000) (short stories and a novella)
• The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2000) (novella)
• The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005) (novella)
• In Persuasion Nation (2006) (short stories)
• Tenth of December: Stories (2013) (short stories)
• A Two-Minute Note to the Future (2014) (essay on brown paper Chipotle bag)
• Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) (novel)

Nonfiction

• A Bee Stung Me, So I Killed All the Fish (Notes from the Homeland 2003-2006) (2006) (promotional chapbook of essays, limited to 500 copies to accompany the book In Persuasion Nation)
• The Braindead Megaphone (2007) (collected essays)
• Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness (2014)

Anthologies

• Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer (2012)

Awards and honors

Awards won

• National Magazine Award for Fiction, 1994 - "The 400-Pound CEO", short story, published in Harper's Magazine
• National Magazine Award for Fiction, 1996 - "Bounty", short story, published in Harper's Magazine
• National Magazine Award for Fiction, 2000 - "The Barber's Unhappiness", short story, published in The New Yorker
• National Magazine Award for Fiction, 2004 - "The Red Bow", short story, published in Esquire
• 2nd Prize in the 1997 O. Henry Awards - "The Falls", short story, published in The New Yorker (January 22, 1996 issue)
• Lannan Foundation - Lannan Literary Fellowship, 2001
• MacArthur Fellowship, 2006
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 2006
• American Academy of Arts and Letters, Academy Award, 2009
• World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story - "CommComm", published in The New Yorker (August 1, 2005 issue)
• PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, 2013
• The Story Prize, 2013 - Tenth of December: Stories
• Folio Prize, 2014 - Tenth of December: Stories
• The New York Times Book Review, "10 Best Books of 2013", Tenth of December: Stories
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Elected as Member, 2014

Finalist honors

• PEN/Hemingway Award, 1996 - Finalist - CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, short story collection
• The Story Prize, 2006 - Finalist - In Persuasion Nation, short story collection
• National Book Award for Fiction, 2014 - Finalist - Tenth of December: Stories
• Bram Stoker Award, 2011 - Finalist - "Home", short story

[ Source: Wikipedia ]