Richard Powers

Powers stated that his next novel was to be about trees. This novel, The Overstory, was published in April 2018, and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize on September 20, 2018 and for the $75,000 2019 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. It won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Overstory was the 2019 runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Powers's novel Orfeo, was published January 20, 2014. Peter Els, a retired music composition instructor and avant-garde composer, is mistaken for a bio-terrorist after being discovered with a makeshift genetics lab in his house.

In an admiring essay, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood praised The Echo Maker as "a grand novel—grand in its reach, grand in its themes, grand in its patterning. That it might sometimes stray over the line into the grandiose is perhaps unavoidable: Powers is not a painter of miniatures. Of the two extremes of American mannerist style, the minimalist or Shaker chair (Dickinson, Hemingway, Carver) and the maximalist or Gilded Age (Whitman, James, Jonathan Safran Foer), Powers inclines toward the latter. He gets his effects by repetition, by a Goldberg Variation–like elaboration of motifs, by cranking up the volume and pulling out all the stops".

Powers often provokes mixed reaction. Writing for The New Yorker, James Wood once likened his fiction to "a dying satyr — above the waist is a mind full of serious thought, philosophical reflection, deep exploration of music and science; below, a pair of spindly legs strain to support the great weight of the ambitious brain."

On August 22, 2013, Stanford University announced that Powers had been named the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English.

In 2010 and 2013, Powers was a Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University, during which time he partly assisted in the lab of biochemist Aaron Straight.

Powers's tenth novel, Generosity: An Enhancement, was published on September 29, 2009. It features a writing instructor named Russell Stone, who encounters one of his students, Thassa, an Algerian woman who is constantly happy. Meanwhile, journalists and scientists hope to exploit Thassa's joyfulness for financial gain.

Powers's ninth novel, The Echo Maker (2006), won a National Book Award and was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist. The novel tells the story of a young man whose brain is injured in a truck accident. Although he largely recovers, he has cognitive impairments, including Capgras syndrome, the suspicion that his sister has been replaced by an imposter. Another important character is a consulting neurologist, modeled to some degree on Oliver Sacks and perhaps Gerald Edelman. The novel explores the themes of cognitive construction of reality, and the relationships between memory and emotional bonds between people, and some of the tensions between the beneficial and exploitative aspects of a famous doctor's work. The events occur along the Platte River in Nebraska, near the shrinking migratory refuge of the sandhill cranes. Social frictions in the story arise out of water and land use disputes.

The Time of Our Singing (2003) is a story about the musician children of an interracial couple who met at Marian Anderson's legendary concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. Powers displays his knowledge of music and physics in this exploration of race relations and the burdens of talent.

Plowing the Dark (2000) is another novel with parallel narratives, this time of a Seattle research team building a groundbreaking virtual reality, while at the same time an American teacher is held hostage in Beirut.

Gain (1998) is a look at the history of a 150-year-old chemical company, interwoven with the story of a woman living near one of its plants and succumbing to ovarian cancer. It won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction in 1999.

Powers was appointed the Swanlund Professor of English at UIUC in 1996, where he is currently an emeritus professor.

Galatea 2.2 (1995) is a Pygmalion story, about an artificial intelligence experiment gone awry. It was informed in part by Powers' experience as an adjunct faculty member in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at Illinois.

Operation Wandering Soul (1993), a finalist for the National Book Award, features a young doctor dealing with the ugly realities of a pediatrics ward. It was written mainly during a year's stay at the University of Cambridge and completed when Powers returned to the University of Illinois in 1992 to take up a post as writer-in-residence.

Powers was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989. He received a Lannan Literary Award in 1999.

Powers learned computer programming at Illinois as a user of PLATO. One Saturday in 1980, while working in Boston as a programmer, he saw the 1914 photograph "Young Farmers" by August Sander at the Museum of Fine Arts. Quitting his job on Monday to write a novel about those depicted on the photograph, Powers spent the next two years writing his first book, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which was published by William Morrow in 1985. It comprises three alternating threads. The first is a novella featuring the three young men in the photo during World War I. The second features a technology magazine editor who is obsessed with the photo. The third is the author's critical and historical musings, mainly about the mechanics of photography and the life of Henry Ford.

The family returned to the U.S. when Powers was 16. Following graduation in 1975 from DeKalb High School in DeKalb, Illinois, he enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) with a major in physics, which he switched to English literature during his first semester. There he earned the BA in 1978 and the MA in Literature in 1980. He decided not to pursue the PhD partly because of his aversion to strict specialization, which had been one reason for his early transfer from physics to English, and partly because he had observed in graduate students and their professors a lack of pleasure in reading and writing (as portrayed in Galatea 2.2).

One of five children, Powers was born in Evanston, Illinois. His family later moved a few miles west to Lincolnwood where his father was a local school principal. When Powers was 11 they moved to Bangkok, Thailand, where his father had accepted a position at International School Bangkok, which Powers attended through his freshman year, ending in 1972. During that time outside the U.S. he developed skill in vocal music and proficiency in cello, guitar, saxophone, and clarinet. He also became an avid reader, enjoying nonfiction, primarily, and classics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Richard Powers (born June 18, 1957) is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2018 Powers has published twelve novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford Universities. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory.