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| George Saunders | |
The National Book Foundation is giving the 2025 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to George Saunders. He will be presented with the medal by Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker, at the 76th National Book Awards ceremony & benefit dinner on November 19 in New York City.
Saunders's work includes the novel Lincoln in the Bardo; the novella "The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil" and the story "Fox 8"; the children's book The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip; the essay collection The Braindead Megaphone; the short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, In Persuasion Nation, Liberation Day, and the National Book Award finalist Tenth of December; and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. His latest novel, Vigil, will be published by Random House in January 2026. He has taught Creative Writing at Syracuse University since 1996, and his work has regularly appeared in the New Yorker since 1992. In 2025, Saunders was a selector for the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 program.
Saunders has won the Booker Prize, the Folio Prize, the PEN/Bernard and Ann Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and the Story Prize. He has received fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Foundation, Lannan Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation, and he was named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People.
National Book Foundation chair David Steinberger said, "George Saunders is the author of more than a dozen books--from short story and essay collections to novels and a children's book--that offer an incisive, comedic, and urgent perspective on our world. Throughout his career, Saunders has captured the imagination of readers and mentored countless writers in and outside of the classroom."
Foundation executive director Ruth Dickey said, "Through immersive world-building, deeply human characters, and compassionate curiosity towards the most pressing sociopolitical issues of our time, George Saunders' writing exemplifies the power of fiction to unite us despite--and perhaps because of--our fractured and complex world. Saunders' craft book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and Substack Story Club show his genuine enthusiasm for making the process of writing, and reading, accessible and exciting."