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On October 25th, 2025, authors George Saunders and Zadie Smith graced the platform alongside Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker, for a discussion during the 26th annual New Yorker Festival, a weekend filled with discussions, showings, performances, and more. This Festival, a hallmark occasion for the magazine, took place in New York City, uniting prominent figures across literature, film, comedy, television, politics, and medicine.
George Saunders penned “Lincoln in the Bardo,” winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize, along with five story collections, including “Tenth of December,” a National Book Award finalist, and the recent “Liberation Day” collection. He presides over the acclaimed Story Club Substack blog, stemming from his book concerning the Russian short story, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.” Time magazine recognized him in 2013 as one of the 100 Most Influential People around the globe. Since 1997, he has been an instructor within the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
Zadie Smith has authored the novels “White Teeth,” “The Autograph Man,” “On Beauty,” “NW,” “Swing Time,” and “The Fraud”; the shorter novel “The Embassy of Cambodia”; the essay collections “Changing My Mind,” “Feel Free,” “Intimations,” and the upcoming “Dead and Alive”; the short story assembly “Grand Union”; plus the play “The Wife of Willesden,” adapted from a “Canterbury Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer. Moreover, she edited “The Book of Other People.” Smith was born and continues to reside in northwest London.
Deborah Treisman has served as the fiction editor at The New Yorker beginning in 2003. She initially joined the magazine in 1997 as the deputy fiction editor. She hosts the award-winning New Yorker Fiction Podcast and is the editor for the anthologies “A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925-2025” and “20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker.” In 2012, she was presented with the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for remarkable editorial achievement within the realm of fiction.
Sourse: newyorker.com
