On October 25, 2025, the writers George Saunders and Zadie Smith took the stage with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, for a discussion at the 26th annual New Yorker Festival, a weekend of conversations, screenings, performances, and more. The Festival, which is the magazine’s signature event, was held in New York City and brought together leading voices in literature, film, comedy, television, politics, and medicine.

George Saunders is the author of “Lincoln in the Bardo,” which won the Man Booker Prize in 2017, and five collections of stories, including “Tenth of December,” a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recent collection “Liberation Day.” He is the host of the popular Substack blog Story Club, an outgrowth of his book on the Russian short story, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.” In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People by Time magazine. Since 1997, he has taught in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels “White Teeth,” “The Autograph Man,” “On Beauty,” “NW,” “Swing Time,” and “The Fraud”; a novella, “The Embassy of Cambodia”; the essay collections “Changing My Mind,” “Feel Free,” “Intimations,” and the forthcoming “Dead and Alive”; a collection of short stories, “Grand Union”; and a play, “The Wife of Willesden,” adapted from one of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” She is also the editor of “The Book of Other People.” Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.

Deborah Treisman has been the fiction editor at The New Yorker since 2003. She joined the magazine as the deputy fiction editor in 1997. She is the host of the award-winning New Yorker Fiction Podcast and the editor of the anthologies “A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925-2025” and “20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker.” In 2012, she received the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for editorial excellence in the field of fiction.