George Saunders: Chautauqua Institution Lecture Series
Route 394, Chautauqua, NY 14722
The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and numerous literary awards, George Saunders is the celebrated author of a novel, four collections of short stories, a novella, a book of essays and a children’s book. His most recent collection, Liberation Day, is a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics and justice, cutting to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. It is this work that will help frame his joint presentation for the Chautauqua Lecture Series and Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, during a week dedicated to “Art in Action: Building Community Through the Arts,” in which he’ll consider the significance of books, stories and the literary arts as cultural touchstones in our increasingly siloed and stratified social and intellectual consciousness.
In 2017, Saunders won the Man Booker Prize for his long-awaited first novel Lincoln in the Bardo. His collection Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award, and winner of the 2014 Story Prize for short fiction and the 2014 Folio Prize, which celebrates the best fiction of our time.
His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, GQ and Harpers Magazine, and has appeared in the O’Henry, Best American Short Story, Best Non-Required Reading and Best American Travel Writing anthologies. Named by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2013, Saunders teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.