George Saunders is the winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize for his debut novel Lincoln in the Bardo. The £50,000 ($81,625 Cdn) prize recognizes the best book published in English available in the U.K.

Lincoln in the Bardo is a surprising and complex story set in a graveyard where Lincoln's 11-year-old son has just been laid to rest. It's 1862 — just one year into the American Civil War and Lincoln's presidency. Saunders conjures up a world of ghosts, set against actual historical material and a country in crisis.

"The form and style of this utterly original novel reveals a witty, intelligent and deeply moving narrative," Man Booker Prize jury chair Baroness Lola Young said in a press release. "This tale of the haunting and haunted souls in the afterlife of Abraham Lincoln's young son paradoxically creates a vivid and lively evocation of the characters that populate this other world. Lincoln in the Bardo is both rooted in and plays with history, and explores the meaning and experience of empathy."

Eleanor Wachtel spoke to George Saunders on stage at the Toronto Reference Library in front of a packed house in April 2017.

"I was a working-class person, and when I had a book out for the first time, I got the question about influences. I always fancied it up a bit: 'Well, of course, Dostoyevsky.' Then, as you get more honest, you see that the real influences are the ones that really rattled your cage and that you didn't expect to be art. The movie Jaws was like that for me. It took years before I recognized that power and art are related. Even if the art is a little funky and a little embarrassing, it's still powerful. It gets in you, somehow."

"In the Buddhist tradition, from what I've read, there's this idea that the death moment would not be unrelated to this one right now. The really terrifying thing that I came upon in the The Tibetan Book of the Dead and some of the surrounding texts is the idea that your mind right now is like a wild horse, and your body is like a post it is tethered to. So as neurotic as we can get, and as anxious, and as passionate, it is dampened by our physicality. But when you die, these texts say that the rope gets cut and that wild horse is just — boom. It's the same horse, still. But whatever habits you've cultivated in life get let off the tether and super-sized."

"Think about a culture that has marginalized art and freakified art and commodified it. That culture would have a strange, dysfunctional relationship with truth and language. When you're reading a book, you know how so many boxes in your mind come alive. You're attuned to a semicolon. A pattern of colours becomes meaningful. I would say your mind on art is probably the most open it ever is except maybe love. That's an incredible state of consciousness that makes us wiser and kinder and more engaged. And a culture that degrades that to a sideshow is going to end up in a kind of weird situation like we're in now."