The Library, the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, the Office of Mission and Ministry and the Department of English hosted George Saunders on Thursday, April 11, 2019.

Award-Winning author George Saunders visited the Hilltop for the Annual Casey-McIlvane Memorial Lecture. Saunders, in conversation with Paul Elie, Senior Fellow of the Berkley Center and Director of the American Pilgrimage Project discussed the intersectionality between Catholicism, Buddhism, and writing that came together to shape the story of "Lincoln in the Bardo."

Well-known for his short stories, his first novel Lincoln in the Bardo was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2017. Described by the New York Times as "A luminous feat of generosity and humanism", the novel unfolds in the Oak Hill Cemetery located here in Georgetown. At its heart is a historical tale that on the night Willie Lincoln was interred at Oak Hill, the grieving President Lincoln visited several times to hold his beloved son a final time. In the novel, 166 of the cemetery's residents take turns telling and expanding on this heartbreaking story. This tale of a bond between father and son becomes a sweeping tale about those who have found themselves in "the bardo," a form of purgatory as described in the Tibetan tradition.