This week the American writer George Saunders, celebrated for his short stories, won the Man Booker prize with his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. He talks about brevity, empathy and how he sees writing as a form of activism

George Saunders won the Man Booker prize on Tuesday night, but while he was working on Lincoln in the Bardo, his winning book, he would sometimes stop and ask himself if it really was a novel he was writing. He still sounds a little unsure. “I still, I still … I mean, it says it is!” he says, pointing to the dustjacket; US tradition dictates that a novel is specified as such on its cover.

Until now, Saunders, 58, has been master of the short story. (He won the Folio prize in 2014 for his collection Tenth of December and in 2006 was awarded a MacArthur fellowship.) This explains why he and his wife, Paula, who has been his first reader since they met in 1986 on a creative writing MFA at Syracuse University, still joke about the book. “Pretty good use of white space there!” one of them will say. “I guess it is a novel,” Saunders says.

Back in the early 1990s, when Saunders started writing fiction, he had a job as a technical writer for a firm called Radian Corporation. His degree was in exploration geophysics. Money was tight, time was tight. He and Paula got engaged within three weeks of meeting. “We weren’t the type of person that we would normally be drawn to,” Saunders says. “I think there’s something karmic, some kind of completion thing. I’ve never not been interested in her.” Within three years they were married with two children, now 29 and 27. Short stories made sense. They could fit into the gaps of life, or worked on secretively on a Radian computer screen that should have been filling up with a technical report. I wonder how hard it was to adjust to the longer form. Maybe the length came with the time and the money.

“I’ve always said to my stories: ‘Don’t bloat. Don’t bloat! Let’s get in and out of here as fast as we can,’” Saunders says. He addresses his work often, sometimes as “dear story”, and ascribes to it a wilfulness independent of its author. (As in: “I’m really looking at you, dear story. What do you want me to do?”) “I said the same thing here. And the book said: ‘I know, I know. But …’” It insisted on being less lean. “I thought, that’s wonderful. When a book starts being unruly, that’s good. Remember early punk music. Is that a song? Well, you’re dancing! I love that idea.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Saunders with the Man Booker prize 2017. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

You only need flick the pages of Lincoln in the Bardo to see some of what makes it original. It looks different. Set in February 1862, a year into the civil war, it tells the story of Abraham Lincoln’s visit to the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, Washington DC. His 11-year-old son, Willie, had died of a fever and history tells that his father visited his grave. It was this image of Lincoln sat with the son’s body in his lap that lodged itself in Saunders’ head when he first heard it from his wife’s cousin in 1992.

He couldn’t have known at the time that the story’s civil war setting would take on even greater contemporary significance, in the wake of Charlottesville, where the far right recently marched in opposition to the removal of a statue of confederate commander Robert E Lee. Saunders thinks confederate statues “are stupid. Why would you have those things up? Why would you have a statue up and some of your citizens walk by and are reminded that they used to be brutalised? ... The other thing you don’t hear much discussed is that there are legitimate southern heroes who fought against slavery. African American heroes who escaped and helped other people to escape. That’s culture too. Those statues should go up.”

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The cemetery in Lincoln in the Bardo is populated by a dense crowd of restless spirits. From the sweary Mr and Mrs Baron to the late pickle magnate who just wants to hear that his pickles were appreciated, the voices rise and fade, bicker, beseech and undercut. Sometimes the monologues trail off. There are certain things a spirit in this “bardo” – a transitional state in Buddhist teaching, which Saunders practises – cannot countenance, and death is one.

Unable to accept their fate, the spirits excise death-dealing words from their lexicon. Coffins are “a sort of sick box”, the cemetery is a hospital yard, the chapel a palace, and they look back on their living years as a time of superior health. Their stories are stuck at the instant before their passing, and intercut with citations from historical record, some of which are real, some of which Saunders has made up. This gives all the voices an air of unknowability. Are they “real”? Is the printed word a truthful transcript of their imagined reality? The reader enters his or her own limbo, somewhere in the space between fact and truth, memory and meaning.

The changing political landscape has made these qualities feel even more timely. When Saunders was writing the book, Barack Obama was president of the US. “Remember those days?” he asks. “Weren’t they lovely? Is it really over?” By the time it was published, Donald Trump had moved into the White House. “And I went on tour, and the rooms were alive with it.”

At every event, “sweet young people” would ask Saunders “some version of: ‘Should we stick with the liberal values of sympathy and empathy or should we resist?’ And I was like: ‘They’re the same.’ I don’t see a difference. Vigorous compassion, understood properly, is very energetic. It can be angry, it can be coercive. It doesn’t have to be weak. The misunderstanding of kindness and empathy is that it is someone driving a spike through your head and you’re like: ‘Oh, thank you! I can hang a coat on it!’”

Vigorous compassion is very energetic. It can be angry, it can be coercive. It doesn’t have to be weak

In all his work, Saunders displays a knack for rendering abstract concepts with a specificity that seems both fantastical and familiar. No matter how strange the world of his fiction, at its heart is always something sentimentally recognisable. A reader gets used to the oddness, the same way eyes get used to the dark. He lets you see all the small moments of transition that a heart needs to keep a belief alive.

At its heart, Lincoln in the Bardo is an exploration of empathy. The book’s advocacy of reaching out to the bodies and spirits on the far side of our thoughts climaxes when spirits enter president Lincoln. His inner life is turned outside in the world; the spirits are simultaneously improved. Life breathes back into their memories. They are ghosts with a growth mindset. Saunders is a funny writer, but also incredibly moving.

“My God, what a thing! To find oneself thus expanded!” the spirit Hans Vollman says, and it is interesting to hear Saunders use the same word when he talks about Lincoln’s tenure as president. “He was humble enough to know that he was going to have to work very hard and be continually expanding himself to be a truly great person, and that that expansion had to include other people,” he says.

Maybe there is hope for Trump, too, then? “Er, yes,” he says, violently shaking his head. “I do think a person can change and” – perhaps this is the geophysicist in him – “I’m always happy to look at the data ... But I think, as a fairly decent nation, at some point, we are going to have to say: ‘This can’t be any more.’”

Is writing a kind of activism? “It is. It is. It is. But if I think of it that way, it’s always shitty.” Whenever he has tried to write fiction about Trump or, before that, George Bush, it has never worked out. “I always think to myself that political thoughts, or aesthetic thoughts, are like little deer. They’re very delicate and don’t want you looking at them directly. For me, it’s just about the sentences and the form. Concentrate, concentrate, concentrate. Be truthful. Be lively. And those things will just come right in.”

Since the publication of Tenth of December, Saunders has become something of a celebrity. The 166-strong cast of the audiobook of Lincoln in the Bardo includes David Sedaris, Lena Dunham, Miranda July and Ben Stiller. His book jackets carry praise from Thomas Pynchon, Lorrie Moore and Jonathan Franzen. Hari Kunzru, writing in the Guardian, described Lincoln in the Bardo as “a performance of great formal daring”. Zadie Smith called it “a masterpiece”. Colson Whitehead said it was “a luminous feat of generosity and humanism”. Typically, it is not only Saunders’ work that is admired but his humanity, too.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Abraham Lincoln. Photograph: Photo 12/UIG via Getty Images

He is both a writer’s writer and a people person. The first thing anyone who has met Saunders tells you about him is how nice he is. Even a former office mate at Radian has described him as “one of the most centred, well-adjusted people I’ve ever known”. Despite being a practising Buddhist, he still considers himself in some way Catholic (the religion of his childhood), and his 2013 convocation speech to students at Syracuse University, which went viral, focused on the importance of kindness. “I like the world, and I want to believe that there is some simple code, which is love, and I think that’s ultimately true, but it’s a long path,” he says.

As two of his ghosts, Vollman and Roger Bevins III, say:

“We must try to see one another in this way.”

“As suffering, limited beings –”

“Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.”

No wonder, then, that he should treat his Booker win with comically efficient modesty: “It’s certainly subjective. But thank you. And now let me use it to do better next time.”

He has found in the past that “when I get praise, it helps me be a little bit more brave”. It is typical of his modesty that he sees this as “probably a character flaw”. In fact, I am not sure whether this is really due to the effect of praise, or whether self-improvement is simply Saunders’ habit. Later, he describes almost the same reaction to the fact that CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) and Pastoralia (2000) were received quietly. With quiet praise, but (relatively) humble sales. “When the world underreacted, I thought: ‘Hmm, better try harder. Fail better.’ You know?” People who experience huge success early, “it disrupts their learning curve”. Really? A first book that sells well is unenviable? “So unlucky!” he laughs. “Those poor bastards!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. Photograph: PR

Saunders has a reputation as a voice writer. Many have stuck in his mind from his teenage days helping out in Chicken Unlimited, his dad’s chicken restaurant in Chicago. It seems reasonable to assume that he would have started Lincoln in the Bardo with one character’s monologue. But in fact the opposite was true. Despite the quiet breathfulness of Willie Lincoln’s pauses – there are air gaps, bardos, between words – and the kindhearted buoyancy of Vollman, Saunders says that the book began to work only when he gave himself “permission not to be too fixated on voice”.

He had cast aside a novel “imitating chatlines” that didn’t work but “looked nice”, and the visual appearance immediately lent itself to the Lincoln project, the slablike patches of text interspersed with white space. Each speaker is identified only after they’ve spoken, and this too helped to unlock the story for Saunders. Initially, the characters were identified before their speech, but this troubled him. It was one of those “little things that are sort of aesthetic burrs in your saddle”. So he flipped the ghost attribution to the bottom of each text, and everything fell into place.

Fiction sometimes works like that, he says. “I have a theory that you should honour those little indefensible things that you just love for some reason. In the rest of your life, you have to explain [yourself], but, in fiction, you’re just like: ‘No, this is my thing.’” He laughs. “I think that is actually key to a writer’s individuality.

“My students, I try to tell them: this is the one room where you can be a total diva. You have to, actually. Those thousands of micro choices are what move your book away from your usual common self into something else.”

For the first time since he started out, Saunders is not writing. A year has passed without him writing fiction. This book “emptied out” the artistic well, so he is waiting for it to refill a bit. “I was living in 1862 for a long time,” he says. “I lost my fondness for slang and vernacular.” For now, he is rediscovering his voice, enjoying the delights of standing in a parking lot while his wife pops into a store, appreciating the strips of lawn, the windblown litter. “You think: ‘Well, this is also the world.’”