Which author won the 2017 Booker Prize for 'Lincoln in the Bardo'?

George Saunders won the 2017 Booker Prize for his novel “Lincoln in the Bardo.” It was Saunders’s first full-length novel and marked a major expansion from the short stories for which he was already widely known.

Set largely over one night in a cemetery, the novel imagines Abraham Lincoln grieving the death of his young son, William “Willie” Lincoln, who died in 1862. The title refers to the bardo, a Buddhist term for an intermediate state between death and rebirth. The cemetery’s ghosts become central characters as they struggle to accept that they have died.

The book blends historical research, invented testimony, supernatural fiction and experimental narration. Its subject is not simply Lincoln’s presidency or the American Civil War, but the emotional consequences of private grief during a national catastrophe. A common mix-up is confusing Saunders with Colson Whitehead, who won the Booker Prize the previous year, in 2016, for “The Underground Railroad.”