Ben George

Black and white portrait of Ben George

Ben George is a former executive editor at Little, Brown, where he acquired and edited national bestsellers by authors including Adam Haslett, Leslie Jamison, Nathan Harris, Rick Bass, Rutger Bregman, Edith Pearlman, and Luis Alberto Urrea. Books he has published have been winners of or nominees for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Story Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the PEN/E. O. Wilson Award, among others. Before joining Little, Brown, he was an editor at Viking Penguin, prior to which he was an editor at the literary magazines Tin House and Ecotone, where he edited writers including Emma Cline, Anthony Doerr, Lauren Groff, Denis Johnson, Jonathan Lethem, Yiyun Li, Rebecca Makkai, Ron Rash, Jim Shepard, Maggie Shipstead, and Kevin Wilson, among many others. While at Ecotone, he co-founded Lookout Books, whose debut publication, Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a National Book Award finalist. Debut novels he has published include the Oprah’s Book Club selection The Sweetness of Water, by Nathan Harris; the Carnegie Medal winner The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, by Tom Lin; the #1 Indie Next selection The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, by Nathaniel Ian Miller; and Jaroslav Kalfař’s Spaceman of Bohemia, from which the Netflix film Spaceman, starring Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan, was adapted.