Brief biography

Saunders says winning the Booker ‘kind of reassures you that your assessment of your audience isn’t 100% wrong, which then kind of emboldens you to try bigger and more difficult things’. — AFP

an ongoing and bitterly divisive process.)

What do you think is the role of literature in confusing times?

Among those of us who read, I think it’s the same consolation it ever was, which is: You feel alone, you feel the gap between you and other people is unbridgeable, and then you read a book and that gets softened a bit.

You think, oh yeah, people are actually on the same continuum as I am; it is possible to understand someone else’s mind.

I think the secondary effect, both for the writer and the reader, is that the brain on art is pretty amazing. At least from my experience, when you’re in the middle of writing a book like this, your mind is really sharp and agile and it’s kind of OK with ambiguity, and it’s curious and it’s more fearless. In this situation we’re in right now, anything that makes us bigger in terms of our humanness is a plus. Anything that makes us a little slower to judge or to be violent is useful.

For me, it’s just a consolation to go into that place of artistic creation and be reminded that there are actual layers to who I am. Like, when I’m only on social media, I’m kind of agitated and aggressive, and I want to reach a quick decision and prove to everyone else that they’re GEORGE Saunders is a former geophysicist and technical writer who attended Syracuse University in New York as a mature student and has taught there as an English professor since 1996.

He has been a highly acclaimed short-story writer since the 1990s; Lincoln In The Bardo is his first full-length novel.

On his personal website, georgesaundersbooks.com, Texas-born Saunders says he grew up in Chicago and “(barely) graduated from the Colorado School of Mines with a degree in exploration geophysics”. His interest in writing blossomed while he was working as a geophysicist in Sumatra, Indonesia, and worked “four weeks on and two weeks wrong. But in story mode, you’re kind of doubling down on the idea you can occupy different consciousnesses and move back and forth between different people.

I think that’s just a more enjoyable way to live. It’s like you’re in a off, in a jungle camp that was a 40-minute helicopter ride to the nearest town” – which prompted a lot of reading. Saunders returned home and began studying at Syracuse Uni in the late 1980s, when he met his wife, Paula. The couple has two daughters.

The New Yorker magazine published one of his stories in 1992, heralding “the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship”. Saunders is probably best known outside literary circles for a commencement speech he gave in 2013 at his university about kindness. It went viral on the Internet (tinyurl.com/saunders-speech) and was published as a book in 2014, Congratulations, By The Way: Some Thoughts On Kindness.– dpa period of your life when you’re in really good shape, everything physical is more enjoyable; I think that when you’re reading or writing a lot, it’s the same for your brain.

What do literary awards, in general, mean to you?

The really wonderful thing was to be in that short list with those writers because we really bonded. It was honestly just a feeling of, wow, it’s amazing that I could be in that club. That was the first order thing.

And then selfishly – and this is probably a bad commentary on my character – you think, OK, this group of strangers liked my work and that always gives you a little confidence. I can probably afford to go a little farther, be a little weirder, be a little more difficult now.

So I guess what I would say is, it reassures you that your assessment of your audience isn’t 100% wrong, which then emboldens you to try bigger and more difficult things.

And then, practically, it’s amazing. I came out of the award ceremony and there were like 80 messages on my phone. The Booker has a really incredible power that I hadn’t seen before with any kind of good news, so that was really interesting to see.

My thing is, what you want to do is enjoy it for about a minute and then kind of plough it under the category of things that might help me do better work later. – Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service Jennifer Day is the Chicago Tribune’s books editor. under President Donald Trump.

Saunders beat five other finalists: New Yorker Paul Auster’s quadruple coming-of-age story 4321; American writer Emily Fridlund’s debut story of a Mid-West teenager, History Of Wolves; Scottish author Ali Smith’s Brexit-themed Autumn; British-Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid’s migration story Exit West; and British writer Fiona Mozley’s debut novel Elmet about a fiercely independent family under threat.

Young said the five jurors met for almost five hours on Tuesday to choose the winner, finally agreeing unanimously on Saunders.

“I’m not going to pretend it was easy,” she said.

“We didn’t have any major meltdowns at all. But we did have quite fierce debates.” – AP