National Book Foundation to Present Lifetime Achievement Award to George Saunders

The National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards, today announced that it will award George Saunders with the 2025 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL), which will be presented at the 76^th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 19, 2025. Saunders is a writer and professor of creative writing, as well as a Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow. He is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 13 books, including the short story collection Tenth of December, a Finalist for the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction. Saunders will be presented with the DCAL Medal by Deborah Treisman, the Fiction Editor at The New Yorker.

“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,” said David Steinberger, Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Book Foundation. “Throughout his career, Saunders has captured the imagination of readers and mentored countless writers in and outside of the classroom. It is our honor to celebrate his oeuvre and creative generosity with the 2025 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.”

Born in Amarillo, Texas, Saunders received a BS in Geophysical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. Prior to earning his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University in 1988, Saunders first worked as a geophysicist in Indonesia, then as a technical writer and geophysical engineer for an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, New York. Saunders has been honored by 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.

“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,” said Ruth Dickey, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. “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. We are thrilled to recognize his extraordinary contribution to literature through the presentation of the DCAL Medal at the 76^th National Book Awards.”

Across nearly three decades, Saunders has published an extensive body of work, including 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 based on his Syracuse University course for MFA students. His latest novel, Vigil, will be released in early 2026. A transcript of Saunders’s 2013 convocation address to Syracuse University students was published by the New York Times. A meditation on kindness, the speech was shared more than one million times and published as Congratulations, by the way. 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 served as a selector for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 program.

Saunders is the 38^th recipient of the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which was created in 1988 to recognize a lifetime of literary achievement. Previous recipients include Walter Mosley, Edmund White, Isabel Allende, Robert A. Caro, John Ashbery, Ursula K. Le Guin, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, Karen Tei Yamashita, Art Spiegelman, Rita Dove, and most recently, Barbara Kingsolver. Nominations for the DCAL medal are made by former National Book Award Winners, Finalists, judges, and other writers and literary professionals from around the country. The final selection is made by the National Book Foundation’s Board of Directors. Recipients of the Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters receive $10,000 and a solid brass medal, presented at the National Book Awards.

The 76^th National Book Awards will be held on Wednesday, November 19, 2025 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. The in-person Ceremony & Benefit Dinner, which will be livestreamed for readers everywhere, will include the presentation of the Foundation’s two lifetime achievement awards—the Literarian Award and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters—as well as the 2025 National Book Award Winners in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature. For more information about the 76^th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner and to register for the livestream, please visit nationalbook.org/awards.

George Saunders is the author of 13 books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Booker Prize; five collections of stories including Tenth of December, a Finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the inaugural Folio Prize, and Liberation Day.  He is the host of the popular Substack blog, Story Club, an outgrowth of his book on the Russian short story A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.  In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by TIME Magazine. Since 1996, he has taught creative writing at Syracuse University. His new novel, Vigil, is forthcoming.