Richard Powers

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Richard Powers (born June 18, 1957) is an American novelist whose books explore the effects of modern science and technology.

The Echo Maker's book The Echo Maker received the National Book Award for Fiction in 2006.

Over the course of his career, he has won several other awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship.

Powers has written twelve books and lectured at the University of Illinois and Stanford Universities as of 2018.

For The Overstory, he received the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Life and work

Powers, one of five children, was born in Evanston, Illinois. His family then migrated a few miles west to Lincolnwood, where his father worked as a local school principal. When Powers first appeared in Bangkok, Thailand, where his father had accepted a position at International School Bangkok, which Powers attended through his freshman year and ended in 1972. During that time outside of the United States, he acquired expertise in vocal music as well as cello, guitar, saxophone, and clarinet. He also became a huge reader, enjoying nonfiction and classics such as the Iliad and Odyssey.

When the family was 16 years old, they returned to the United States. Following his graduation from DeKalb High School in DeKalb, Illinois, he enrolled at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with a major in physics, but moved to English literature in the first semester. He earned a BA in 1978 and an MA in Literature in 1980. He decided not to pursue a PhD partially because of his aversion to tight specialization, which had been one reason for his early transfer from physics to English, and partly because he had noticed a lack of interest in reading and writing among graduate students and their instructors, as shown in Galatea 2.2).

Powers, a Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University, served in some of the university's labs with biochemist Aaron Straight in 2010.

In 1989, Powers was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 1999, he received the Lannan Literary Award.

Powers was appointed the Swanlund Professor of English at UIUC in 1996, where he now works as an emeritus professor.

Powers had been named the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing in Stanford University's Department of English on August 22, 2013.

As a PLATO user in Illinois, Powers learned computer programming and then moved to Boston to work as a programmer. Powers experienced the 1914 photograph "Young Farmers" by August Sander at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and was inspired enough to write a book about the people in the photograph one Saturday. Powers wrote a book entitled Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which was published by William Morrow in 1985. It's divided into three distinct threads: a novella starring the three young men in the photo during World War I, a technology magazine editor obsessed with the photo, and Henry Ford's critical and historical musings on photography and Henry Ford's life. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. It has also been given a Special Citation from the PEN Hemingway Awards.

The powers travelled to the Netherlands, where he wrote Prisoner's Dilemma about The Walt Disney Company and nuclear warfare.

He correlated with The Gold Bug Variations in genetics, music, and computer science. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Powers wrote Operation Wandering Soul in 1993 about an agonized young pediatrician. It was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Powers first published Galatea 2.2 about an artificial intelligence experiment gone awry in 1995. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Powers wrote Gain in 1998 about a 150-year-old chemical company and a woman who lives near one of its factories and who succumbs to ovarian cancer. In 1999, it received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction.

While an American teacher is held hostage in Beirut, Plowing the Dark reveals that a Seattle research team is constructing a revolutionary virtual reality. The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters awarded the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award.

In 2003, Powers wrote The Time of Our Singing. It's about the musician children of an interracial couple who attended Marian Anderson's 1939 concert on the Lincoln Memorial steps.

The Echo Maker, Powers' ninth book, is about a Nebraska man who sustained head injury in a truck accident and claims his caregiver sister is an imposter. It was named a National Book Award and was a finalist in Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Powers' tenth book, titled Generosity: An Enhancement, traces Russell Stone's encounter with Thassa, an Algerian woman whose continuous joy is exploited by journalists and scientists.

Powers wrote Orfeo about Peter Els, a retired music composition instructor and avant-garde composer who is mistaken for a bioterrorist after being uncovered with a makeshift genetics lab in his house in 2014.

The Overstory, which was released in April 2018, is about nine Americans whose unique life experiences with trees brought them together to discuss forest destruction. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the $75,000 2019 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, as runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Bewilderment, a fiction book that was published in September 2021, was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Award and longlisted for the National Book Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In Richard Powers' deeply moving and brilliantly original book, it is described as "an astrobiologist thinks of a novel to help his rare and troubled son."

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