George Saunders is a writer and journalist with an ever-increasing profile in the UK, and writes a weekly column for the Guardian Weekend Magazine TOPICAL SUBJECT MATTER: American culture and politics is always in the news post-Iraq.

'Deceptively light ... deadpan funny ... Saunders, as an American social and literary critic, may be shaping up as the Orwell of the millennium' The Times 'Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny' Zadie Smith 'Saunders is a warm and funny guide through familiar and foreign landscapes ... His job is to observe and be funny ... in a tone often reminiscent of Bill Bryson' Observer 'Again and again, Saunders demonstrates that wacky, subversive, formally strange writing is not only contrary to our nation's capitalist spirit, it's the most natural and effective of responses to it. He makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We're lucky to have him' Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections

George Saunders is the author of the novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil and three short story collections, In Persuasion Nation, Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, as well as the children's book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. His work has received four National Magazine Awards, and has been selected for the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories collections. In 1999, Saunders was recognized as one of the 20 best young American fiction writers by the New Yorker. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.