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Scott Russell Sanders (born October 26, 1945, in Memphis, Tennessee) is an American novelist and essayist.

Sanders has won acclaim for his skill as a personal essayist. A contributing editor for Orion magazine, he has won the John Burroughs Natural History Essay Award, the Indiana Authors Award, and the Mark Twain Award, among other honors. A frequent public lecturer, Sanders also conducts writing workshops across the United States, including recent ones in Alaska, Vermont, Massachusetts, Oregon, and New Mexico. He received the Lannan Literary Award in 1995 for his non-fiction writing, and has received the Frederic Bachman Lieber Award for Distinguished Teaching, the highest teaching award given at Indiana University. In 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sanders was a judge for the 2016 Permafrost Book Prize in Nonfiction for Permafrost: Literary Journal.

Sanders was a distinguished professor of English at Indiana University, where he taught from 1971 until his retirement in 2009. During his career, he has spent sabbatical years as a writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy, and as a visiting professor at University of Oregon, MIT, and Beloit College. He is married with two children, Eva and Jesse, both of whom he addresses in letters included in The Force of Spirit.

He and his wife, Ruth, a biochemist, live in Bloomington, Indiana, in the watershed of the White River.